Video Game / Dragon Ball Xenoverse

The hero is Goku? No, the hero is YOU!

Someone summons you from a land far away... Brave Warrior! Now, come forth!

—Shenron

Dragon Ball Xenoverse is a Dragon Ball game developed by Dimps for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC.

Originally known as Dragon Ball New Project, Dragon Ball Xenoverse is the fifteenth Dragon Ball fighting game released on home consoles since Dimps' first Dragon Ball Z: Budokai game, and the first fighting game developed by Dimps to feature full 3D battles similar to Spike Chunsoft's Budokai Tenkaichi video game series. Fighters can traverse the large, free-roaming stages that allow for fights on ground, air or water. Players can run when on the ground and swim while underwater as well. Dragon Ball Xenoverse has dialogue while fights go on, and fighters show facial expressions when they strike an opponent or take damage.

The plot of the game is that Future Trunks, who has now been hired as part of the Time Patrol, has noticed distortions that end up altering the timeline and changing what should have happened in the unaltered past. Seeking the strength to help him stop these mysterious changes, he gathers the Dragon Balls and makes a wish for a warrior powerful enough to help him fix the timeline - you!

One key feature in this game is the ability to customize your own characters any way you can. Players can choose to be Humans, Saiyans, Namekians, Majins and Frieza's race. You can choose to go through the campaign and help Trunks (in his Time Patrol attire from Dragon Ball Online) fix the timeline due to Towa and Mira's mistakes, or go online to Tokitoki City and fight/team up with friends for 1-v-1, 2-v-2 or 3-v-3 battles similar to Battle of Z.

A sequel was released on October 25, 2016.

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Playable Characters

• Custom Male Saiyan (Base, Kaioken, KKX3, KKX20, SSJ, SSJ2, Super Vegeta, Super Vegeta 2)
• Custom Female Saiyan (Base, Kaioken, KKX3, KKX20, SSJ, SSJ2, Super Vegeta, Super Vegeta 2)
• Custom Male Human (Base, Kaioken, KKX3, KKX20)
• Custom Female Human (Base, Kaioken, KKX3, KKX20)
• Custom Male Majin (Base, Kaioken, KKX3, KKX20)
• Custom Female Majin (Base, Kaioken, KKX3, KKX20)
• Custom Namekian (Base, Kaioken, KKX3, KKX20}
• Custom Frieza Race (Base, Kaioken, KKX3, KKX20)
• Goku (Base, Kaioken, KKX3, KKX20, SSJ, SSJ2, SSJ3)
• Goku (Super Saiyan God)
• Goku (Super Saiyan God Super Saiyan) (DLC)
• GT Goku (Base, SSJ, SSJ3) (DLC)
• GT Goku (SSJ4)
• Kid Gohan
• Teen Gohan (SSJ, SSJ2)
• Gohan (Base, SSJ, SSJ2, Ultimate)
  • Great Saiyaman (Base, SSJ)
  • Gohan (Villainous Mode)
• Goten (Base, SSJ)
• Pan (DLC)
• Vegeta (Base, Super Vegeta, Super Vegeta 2)
  • Vegeta (Super Vegeta) (Villainous Mode)
• Vegeta (Super Saiyan God Super Saiyan) (DLC)'
• GT Vegeta (SSJ4) (Pre-Order DLC)
• Future/Time Patrol Trunks (Base, SSJ)
  • Time Patrol Trunks (SSJ) (Villainous Mode)
• Kid Trunks (Base, SSJ)
• GT Trunks (Base, SSJ) (DLC)
• Piccolo
• Krillin (Base, Kaioken)
• Yamcha (Base, Kaioken)
• Tien Shinhan
• Mr. Satan
• Videl
  • Great Saiyaman II
• Gotenks (Base, SSJ, SSJ3)
  • Gotenks (SSJ3) (Villainous Mode)
• Vegetto (Base, SSJ)
• Bardock (Base, SSJ)
• Raditz
• Nappa
• Saibamen
  • Caiwaremen
  • Kyuukonmen
  • Copymen
  • Tennenmen
  • Jinkoumen
• Raspberry
  • Navel
  • Monre
  • Gupure
• Appule
  • Nabana
  • Robery
  • Ramon
  • Orlen
• Guldo
• Recoome
• Burter
• Jeice
• Captain Ginyu
• Frieza 1st Form
• Frieza Final Form
• Frieza 100%
  • Frieza (Villainous Mode)
• Golden Frieza (DLC)
• Android 17
• Android 18
• Cell Perfect
• Cell Super Perfect
  • Cell (Villainous Mode)
• Cell Jr.
• Majin Buu
  • Small Majin Buu
• Super Buu
• Kid Buu
  • Buu (Villainous Mode)
• Broly (Legendary Super Saiyan)
  • Broly (Legendary Super Saiyan) (Villainous Mode)
• Beerus
• Whis
• Super 17
• Omega Shenron
• Gogeta (SSJ4)
• Eis Shenron (DLC)
• Nuova Shenron (DLC)
• Jaco the Galactic Patrolman (DLC)
• Towa (DLC)
• Mira (DLC)

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This video game contains examples of:

• A Taste of Power: Players start off as a fully powered Goku in his three most iconic fights (Frieza, Perfect Cell, and Kid Buu), before making their Time Patroller and going through the tutorial.
• Actor Allusion: One of the custom character voice options in the English version has a bunch of Dragon Ball Z Abridged references, courtesy of Curtis Arnott aka Takahata101 using his Abridged!Nappa voice and his Team Four Star mates altering the script to match.
• Adaptational Badass:
  • Captain Ginyu, of all people. In the canon series, while Ginyu can switch bodies, he can't use the skills that the original owner possessed. Xenoverse throws that entirely out the window; when Ginyu changes bodies, he gets everything, and he starts throwing out Kamehamehas and going Super Saiyan in some scenes where he's Goku (or you). (Though he is under the influence of Towa when doing so).
  • Also, count this as yet another example of Dimps doing this to Hercule Satan, albeit downplayed from the Budokai series. While his strikes are weak individually and over half his skill moves are conventionally useless, his punches can't be tanked^note with the exception of quest-specific A.I.s; see The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard below any more than any other character's can. He has a couple of high volume combos with knockdown or knockback finishes based on his "attack" on Cell in the series, his Rolling Hercule Punch skill is an effective confuse-and-stun move and his Dynamite Kick can be charged up into a furious combo especially if set up right. Though he's clearly the weakest fighter in the game technically, in the hands of the right player he can become a Lethal Joke Character. Then there's Dark Mr. Satan in the Time Breaker-altered Cell arc. Without the Future Warrior's intervention, HE KILLS GOKU.
  • Downplayed example with Krillin. In the original series, his attempt to cut Vegeta's tail to revert him from his great ape form to his original form failed, and it was Yajirobe who did it. In Xenoverse, Krillin succeeded in his attempt, and it's treated as if he did the same thing in the original timeline as well.
  • Gameplaywise Humans whether they're the Player Character or Yamcha, Tien, Krillin and Videl can go toe to toe with guys like the Ginyu Force and win. The Player Character as a human can beat three Saiyans by themselves at the same time without breaking a sweat. The humans are still weak when they're fighting the Player Character however.
• Adaptational Nice Guy: Cell as your mentor comes across less like a homicidal Jerkass, and more as a Challenge Seeker who's just looking to have fun.
• Adapted Out: A number of the more minor antagonists, including Cui, Dodoria, Zarbon, Android 16, Android 19, Dr. Gero, and oddly enough, Dabura and Babidi^note Dabura is revealed to be Towa's brother, and Babidi, for some reason, is not mentioned at all. Nor does he appear when Goku faces Fat Buu. Especially when Buu is supposed to kill him in the original source after Goku leaves the battlefield after Trunks grabs the Dragon Radar.. In most cases, their gear at least is up for grabs, though the Frieza trio don't even get that acknowledgment. On the hero side, Bulma and Uub are also MIA.
• A God Am I:
  • Demigra is the Demon God. He plans to remake history and the universe as he sees fit.
  • Super Saiyan God Goku also plays with this; as one of his character select quotes is "Am I... a god?"
• Affably Evil: Captain Ginyu, who is by far one of the nicest mentors in the game, especially compared to Vegeta. He (and the rest of the Ginyu Force) welcome the player happily upon completion of training.
• All There in the Dialogue: It's revealed about halfway through the game that Time Patrol Trunks is, in fact, the very same Future Trunks that traveled to the past and fought in the Cell Games. How did he end up in the even-farther future? The game never tells you in-cutscene, but speaking to the Grand Supreme Kai of Time will uncover that she had planned on dealing with Cell herself, but stopped when she saw Trunks had already traveled to the past. She then suckered him into working for her after cleaning up his future by claiming building a time machine was a mortal sin.
• Ancient Evil: Demon God Demigra was sealed away 75 million years ago.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: Some of the rewards you can get for Mentor missions include copies of their costumes that you can use for your custom characters. You can also get clothes from the Parallel Quests, many of which can only be obtained in this way.
  • The Elder Kai is notable for being the one mentor who does not give any pieces from his costume as a reward... instead, he gives the student pieces of Kid Chi-Chi's costume.
• Anime Hair: The hairstyles you can give your Human or Saiyan characters.
• All Girls Want Bad Boys: The reason why the Supreme Kai of Time has a crush on Bardock.
• Alternate Self: Future Trunks and Kid Trunks have this going, as well as several of the GT characters and their Z/Super selves. The only ones who capitalize on this with special quotes against each other, however, are the Trunks characters and the two Android 17s (regular and Super). No, not even Super Saiyan 4 vs. Super Saiyan God or SSGSS counterpart matches have them.
• Alternate Timeline: Notably, it's stated in the GT DLC that its universe is a splinter timeline created by Trunks messing with time, thus explaining how the events of both it and Battle of Gods can appear in the game.
• Anti-Frustration Features: The game allows the player to go back on already completed missions, which can assure a higher scoring and more experience or items gained. The game also allows them to switch mentors, should their current teachings be dissatisfying. Nothing is permanent or lost.
  • Mentor missions that involve beating them with a certain skill keep the mentor's health from going down to zero until you use the right move.
• Anti Poop-Socking: Surprisingly averted considering the MMO nature of the game. There is nothing stopping a player from redoing missions and playing as much as they want. Word of God says that they wanted to give players their money's worth.
• Amazing Technicolor Population: Created characters can have any color skin tone and preexisting time patrolmen are colored in ways their usual for their races, excepting Supreme Kai and Trunks.
• Apocalypse How: Demigra hopes to enact a Class X-4 to Class Z apocalypse by destroying the Time Vault, wiping out all of history and the universe as we know it, so he can remake them in his own image.
• Acquired Poison Immunity: During the Final Battle, Goku reasons that he's immune to Demigra's mind control because he became a god once.
• Arm Cannon: Raspberry's fighting style utilizes an arm-mounted ki blaster. It's a surprisingly cool skill for a Mook character, but unfortunately it falls under the handful of Secret A.I. Moves that can never be learned by the Time Patroller.
• Artificial Brilliance:
  • In later Parallel Quests, the AI really starts getting smart. Among the things they'll do is relentlessy pursue you, use ki blasts while you're charging attacks, do everything they can prevent you from using Ultimate Attacks and items, and just overall piss you off to the point you'll think the computer is playing by its own rules. This is even more frustrating in quests where you can't bring teammates, meaning that if you're up against multiple enemies, prepare to be fighting one enemy and have another rudely butt in. Compare this to enemies in earlier quests, who are content with keeping their distance, won't use Evasive Skills to break combos, and most importantly, won't go Super Saiyan and spam Ultimate Attacks. In fact, in the first fight with Mira in story mode, one can keep their distance completely and defeat him using nothing but Super Attacks without taking any damage.
  • The 17 and 18 of Trunks' timeline (as well as Parallel Quests 26 and 27) can and will tag team you mercilessly. Whichever one you are fighting switching targets, while the one you aren't flies in to attack you from behind.
• Artificial Stupidity:
  • In storyline and parallel quests, the AI that fights you is much more competent than the AI that fights with you. Good luck getting your ally AI to do anything other than fly in circles or stand in place. They also have a habit of flying directly in the way of enemy ultimate attacks. Averted in offline vs. mode, as the competence of the AI on both sides are generally equal in proportion to the characters themselves.
  • Future Trunks hasn't been programmed to realize that his ultimate only works straight up, and will attempt to use it when standing next to you. Somewhat downplayed, as if you get too close during the charge you'll still be hurt and knocked upwards, leaving you prone to the actual blast…a mistake which your ally in quests may be particularly prone to per the above.
  • Although it isn't common, if an AI tries to fly at someone in between a stage obstacle, they'll just keep flying straight into it.
• Ascended Meme: One of the voice options for custom characters is none other than Abridged Nappa.
  • Some of the civilians in the city also use the voice, and greet you with "'egeta". According to the Dragon Ball Xenoverse Lets Play by Team Four Star, this was an outtake and they never even knew it was going to be used. They were also allowed to completely rewrite Voice 8's entire script, so all the attack names are now jokes.
  • This trope subtly comes into play during the ultimate finish boss battles — said bosses have three life bars that each consist of 3000 HP, for a total of 9000 (nine thousand) HP.
  • Yamcha's memetic death pose is not only an emote you can use in Tokitoki City, but it's actually a special attack called "Feign Death".
• Ass-Kicking Pose: Anyone can do this in Tokitoki City to entertain other people.
• The Atoner: A conversation with Time Patrol Trunks reveals that he works under the Supreme Kai of Time as atonement for the sin of trying to change history during the Android Saga. Supreme Kai of Time later admits she lied just so she'd have a friend and was surprised that Trunks took it at face value.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Great Apes, which are used as a form of Puzzle Boss ala previous game Ultimate Tenkaichi. Great Ape Vegeta shouldn't give fledgling Patrollers too much difficulty, but Golden Great Ape Baby will be quite a different matter...
• Awesome, but Impractical: Several techniques in this game fit the bill, such as the Kaio-ken (and its upgrades), which constantly drain stamina, but boost your skills.
  • The Big Bang Kamehameha and its ultimate counterpart. Both give impressive damage, with the latter being capable of one-hitting an entire bar of health on a fairly high-level opponent. The tradeoff is this: The super move requires time to charge or it won't fire, making it useless for juggle combos. And an invite to be punched in the face by an enemy who averts Mook Chivalry. The ultimate move only has an approximate 20% chance of hitting the target, as it's common for enemies to move out of the way, especially if they're not locked onto you. Moreover, neither of them has an autocorrect function. Meaning, if an enemy moves behind you while you fire, instead of turning around like with most of the moves, your character will just fire at nothing while your opponent attacks you from the back.
  • Hercule's Dynamite Kick is a single weak kick with a tiny explosion effect, but if you charge it up, it turns into a beatdown combo that does respectable damage. The problem is that it takes 3-4 seconds to charge and has short range even for a Strike Attack, meaning that it's extremely hard to connect with unless you use it as a wake-up attack.
  • Nappa's Break Cannon certainly qualifies. It uses up all of your ki, but the more ki you have, the stronger the technique is. The DLC Final Shine Attack and the Emperor's Death Beam your character can learn functions similarly, for the former you get to hold the buttons to use up energy and make it stronger, but if you want to use it at full power without going Super Saiyan you're going to need plenty of points in max ki.
  • The Spirit Bomb has you gather energy and fling a glowing blue ball of death. As long as someone doesn't run up to you and punch you in the face as soon as you're finished charging it.
  • So you've finally gotten the ability to transform into one of the Super Saiyan 2 forms. Enjoy the 3% (at best) increase in power from Super Saiyan, all for the low cost of much higher energy drain.
  • Trunks' Heat Dome Attack. It's very flashy and dynamic, but only fires straight up. Even if the opponent is right beside you when you fire the attack, they will only stumble back, barely taking any damage from it at all.
  • Vegeta's Flash Strike, along with Piccolo's Evil Eyes, are some of the earliest and most extreme examples of this trope. Flash Strike is basically that move Vegeta used during the Frieza Saga to make Cui and Dodoria go boom, and Piccolo's Evil Eyes is shockingly the only Eye Beams skill in the game. Both skills have amazing range but are very weak in terms of power and accuracy, making them impractical to use even at lower levels. Frieza has an unlearnable skill, Death Psycho Bomb, that functions similarly to the above two skills.
  • Vegito's Spirit Sword is supposed to stun the opponent and have you smack everyone in the vicinity with an energy sword. Too bad they can get out of the way if someone attacks them, or they can just use an evasive to avoid it. And the max range to activate the sword is bigger than the follow up swing.
• Bad "Bad Acting": In universe Beerus can accuse Whis of this when he is "defeated". Beerus complains that if Whis intends to fake it he should at least do so well.
  Oh nooooo, I lost. -Whis
• Big Entrance: The Future Warrior gets a few, sometimes by saving someone, other times by appearing out of light on the battlefield.
• Bad Future: Trunks' era in his native timeline, courtesy of unfettered 17 and 18.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Because of Towa's and Mira's meddling, many iconic scenes and battles are changed to play out as if the villain won or at least at a far bigger advantage against the heroes:
  • Raditz breaks out of Goku's grasp before the Special Beam Cannon hits him, causing only Goku to die. Raditz then finishes off Piccolo.
  • Goku returns from Other World to find all of his comrades dead (Instead of Krillin and Gohan left alive), leaving him to fight a losing battle against Vegeta and Nappa, both boosted by Towa and in their Great Ape forms.
  • The Ginyu Force kill Gohan, Krillin, and Vegeta (in Ginyu's body) with Ginyu pulling off a body-swapping on Vegeta. He and his teammates then swarm Goku, with Ginyu performing another body-swap on Goku and finishing him with a Kamehameha.
  • Frieza defeats the Z-Warriors. Goku, desperate to save his son, leaves his healing tank too early to rescue Gohan, but leaving him to fight against a much stronger Frieza.
  • Gohan is forced to beam struggle Cell in his normal Super Saiyan form while Goku and allies are incapacitated by a powered-up Hercule. Cell's Cell Jrs. step in with their own Father-Son Kamehameha and kill Gohan.
  • Trunks is killed by the Androids in Bridge Town. Since this would be before he joined Time Patrol, this means Time Patrol Trunks (and his wish to Shenron, and the Future Warrior's term as a Time Patroller, and everything they've done to avert the above bad fates) is in danger of being Ret-Gone. Oh and a powered up Imperfect Cell is nearby.
  • Fat Buu creates two clones to overwhelm a Super Saiyan 3 Goku.
  • Demigra possesses and powers up Piccolo and forces him to kill Goten and Trunks. Afterwards, Super Buu skips absorbing Gotenks, Piccolo and Gohan and destroys the Earth during his battle with Gohan.
• Bad Present: Age 850 becomes one to Trunks due to the Time Breakers and later(?), Demigra.
• Batman Can Breathe in Space: Two stages take place in space: one above Planet Vegeta (based on Bardock's rebellion against Frieza) and one above the earth (inspired by the climax of Goku's duel with Beerus).
  • Of course, in the DBU, it certainly seems that, if your power level is high enough, you can. Bardock and Frieza could do so too.
• Battle Bikini: Chi-Chi's childhood outfit is available for female characters.
• Beat the Curse Out of Him: Whenever a good guy gets hit with the black and purple aura. It starts with Hercule at the Cell Games, and then afflicts multiple Z Fighters and Time Patrol Trunks near the end.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: Towa and Mira.
• Big Bad Ensemble: Towa and Mira on one side and Demigra on the other. Their goals and motivations are separate, though Towa's meddling with time ends up helping out Demigra.
• Big Damn Heroes: Something your character will end up doing a lot.
  • Other characters can do this in Parallel Quests, as well, and not always for the good guys.
  • Your very own Master can arrive to save you if you're in a bind during a Parallel Quest. Nothing quite restores morale like Lord Beerus arriving to save his student.
  • At the end of the story when facing down a revived and super-charged Frieza, Cell, and Kid Buu it finally comes time for Goku to do this for the Future Warrior and continues to back them up throughout the final battle.
• "Blind Idiot" Translation: The game's English release featured script work that is, at some points, shonky. For example, characters will use male pronouns for your created character, even if they are female. The worst example is for Namekians, who seem to be constantly referred to as "a Namek".
  • Justified for Namekians, as they do not have gender and reproduce asexually.
  • In the cutscene that follows Gohan's defeat of Cell, Yamcha shouts "I did it!" rather than "He did it!", as a result of the translators misinterpreting the original Japanese line "Yatta!".
  • When Ginyu takes over your character's body, Goku says they need to get his body back. And before that, Gohan tells Krillin that your character in Ginyu's body is different from the guy they fought earlier...by saying "he's the guy we fought earlier"!
  • When the Trunks from the Cell Saga returns to his time, he says "we" returned as if the player had joined him. The player was actually working with Time Patrol Trunks and Cell-era Trunks hasn't met him/her yet.
  • Time Patrol Trunks appears to forget whether he's talking about Mira or Towa at times, leading to gender pronouns being assigned to the wrong character.
  • The Supreme Kai of Time referred to Demigra as a Majin, as does Goku in one of Demigra's unused vs. battle quotes. In truth, Demigra is not a Majin like Majin Buu: rather, Majin is also the pronunciation of the kanji for "Demon God". This lead to many players mistakenly believing Demigra to be a Majin as opposed to an honest-to-"goodness" demon god.
  • There are also times where the dialogue in the speech box doesn't match up to what a character says.
  • In the DLC, Goku thanks the player for helping by saying "Thanks for helping out Pan", but Sean Schemmel's inflection is "Thanks for helping out, Pan", as if he was talking to her and not you. This was apparently due to bad communication from the AR director.
  • There's also Pan vs. Future Trunks, where Pan remarks on how different Trunks is and wonders if it really is him. The following quote isn't the conclusion of Pan's musings, but rather is Trunks' response to it:
  "No, you're not the Trunks I know."
  • In the story cutscenes, the dialogue is noticeably slower and often stops at different points than the characters' lip movements due to them being matched up to the Japanese language's mouth movements.
    • This is a common problem in modern games made in Japan due to the difficulty of changing the mouth movements. Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is another good example of this. The pronoun problem is also partially due to the difference between English and Japanese. The pronoun "watashi" is gender neutral, but the best we have is "they", and people are still divided as to whether you can use it as a gender neutral pronoun for a person. There's also neo-pronouns like "ze", but they're not mainstream enough to use.
• Blood Knight: Lots of characters (this is a DBZ game, after all) but a special shout-out goes to Mira, who is said to only be happy when he's fighting strong opponents.
• Blown Across the Room: Whenever you're hit by a powerful attack.
• Body Horror: The bio armor used by Frieza's race is organic and generated by their own bodies. While that may be unsettling, specially with the shapes taken by advanced designs, the final tier takes the cake: It is a hybrid costume, combining the bio armor with standard space armor. That's it, clothes grafted with bodily growths.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Grabbing is perhaps the most insanely easy way to beat a boss. It's somewhat harder for Saiyans, due to the the fact that the grab tosses them below you and has you hovering over them, but it's rather hard to avoid. It does more damage than one would assume, and can be spammed. Infamously, Team Four Star used it to beat Frieza after numerous failed attempts, and all of them were shocked, even more so when it got them an A rank.
  • The one skill you'll always have to spend one of your super slots on, at least if you are a Ki user (or even a Strike user, as those moves cost Ki too), is one of the Charge series of skills, which allows your character the ability to charge their ki (an ability that in almost every other DB game is treated as basic as punching).
  • Some of the evasive skills. Instant Rise has your character Flash Step far away and Turn Retreat is just your character jumping out of the way while spinning like a top. Getting out of the way is always important if an enemy can either just use an Immune to Flinching evasive skill as soon as your attack hits or if they can just power through it with Super Armor.
  • Meteor Crash is a melee skill given at the beginning of the game, and is rather unimpressive compared to later skills the player character can learn — however, it is also one of the best melee attacks, as the combo can reach up to 30 hits and take off a lot of the enemy's health, especially if the player character's attribute points are mainly placed in Strike Super Attacks.
  • Nappa's Giant Storm, which can be obtained quite early in the game, has very fast startup, a very long range compared to most ultimates, and deals reliably large damage on top of juggling anyone it hits. Practically the only downside to this attack is that it can be blocked, though that holds true of almost every skill except Special Beam Cannon, and its utility in both crowd control and damage dealing make it practically a staple at any level, regardless of build.
  • Piccolo's Special Beam Cannon, which can also be obtained early and is one of the few moves to be completely unblockable. The downside is that it does not exactly deal a whole lot of damage (tell Raditz that, huh?) and can be easily dodged, but the sheer utility of dealing reliable damage to turtles (or characters with super armor, who become frustratingly common lategame) make this a skill that players will turn to long after all the other early-game skills have worn out their shelf life.
• Brutal Honesty:
  • Cell, if you have him as your mentor. He considers the whole thing a game (seeing how much he can improve on an "imperfect" being like yourself) and openly refers to you as his personal chess piece. After you clear his evaluation mission, he openly admits to following this trope, saying that faked compassion wouldn't benefit either of you.
  • Piccolo too. However, while Piccolo is merely astonished when you get a Z Rank, Cell says "I would TOTALLY hug you if that's something I did!"
• The Bus Came Back: Time Patrol Trunks, Towa and Mira from the now defunct Dragon Ball Online.
• Call-Back
  • At the conclusion of the Battle of Gods Saga, the Player Character punches through Demon God Demigra's torso, not unlike how a young Goku slayed Demon King Piccolo.
  • This game goes further with Call Backs, such as Piccolo mentioning how his father lost to the Mafūba, Tenshinhan being able to use the Kamehameha (the first game in which he's able to), and these are just to start. The game is full of rich call backs for the fans to enjoy.
    • Zig-Zagged, with tons of variations of Saibamen, but only first and final form Frieza, only Perfect Cell, and many other characters missing.
• Canon Discontinuity: In the GT DLC, Trunks specifically states that the events of GT take place in a splintered timeline apart from the main one. Eyebrow-raisingly enough, however, this specification isn't given during the battle with Broly.
• Casual Time Travel: Starting with the age 850, rather than Dragon Ball Online's age 1000.
• Casting Gag: One of the custom Japanese voices is Nobuyuki Hiyama, who had a role playing another hero of time.
• Cel Shading: Just like Dragon Ball Online and most of the Budokai games.
• Character Customization: One of the biggest draws of this game, since you can make characters of any major race from the series. You can also create female characters, unless you are playing as a Namekian or Frieza's race.
• Charged Attack: Melee attacks as well as some supers.
• Close-Enough Timeline: This is the mission of the Time Patrol. While some things in the timeline are inevitably altered, such as Frieza going directly into his final form instead of transforming into each one consecutively, as long as history ultimately plays out how it was meant to (Goku successfully beating the bad guys), they're fine with it.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: On the character select screen for created characters, Human slots are blue, Saiyan slots are yellow, Majin slots are pink, Namekian slots are green and Frieza slots are purple.
• Combined Energy Attack: The Spirit Bomb. Also, in the secret ending: as the Time Patroller fires a Kamehameha at Demigra, the spirits of Goku, Gohan, Vegeta, Piccolo, and Krillin lend some energy to them to give them the power needed to defeat the Demon God once and for all.
• Combobreaker: The point of evasive skills.
• Competitive Multiplayer
• Composite Character:
  • Demon God Demigra. He initially appears to be a stylized version of Shinnok, with the same color scheme and God of Evil base. His second form, however, makes him look like Yakon with Blanka's hair and a Shadow Dragon two-tone. Upon closer examination, his personality is actually closer to that of Enel while his "evil pale magician/dark world beast king" motif seems to combine the Akira Toriyama-drawn Dhoulmagus and Rhapthorne.
  • Many of the characters, in fact, have been altered from their canon selves and are more like their Abridged selves. Ginyu is a kind, caring Father to His Men rather than just using them, and Frieza is more caring to his competent minions, much like how in the Abridged series, as he actually cares about the Ginyu Force and wonders what to send their families over their deaths. This is unsurprising, since Christopher Sabat is a known fan, and was the director of the English version. Male Voice 8 is Abridged Nappa, even.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard:
  • When the player plays through the game, they have to watch out for a few things: limited ki, limited stamina, and if you're a Saiyan, limited time to stay transformed as a Super Saiyan. The quest and story A.I.? As the difficulty increases, they completely disregard the game rules for the sake of being "difficult". Saiyans stay transformed indefinitely, they dodge techniques or unleash Evade attacks like no tomorrow and ultimates are spammed to the point where they may as well all be Android 17 and 18 with their unlimited ki and stamina. It gets frustrating very quickly.
  • For more general cheat-ness, the AI can suddenly get the Auto-Guard ability (instantly blocks attacks if possible; which they can still do if you're attacking from behind), the ability to lock on from across the map, and they can keep their lock ons on moves that disable them.
  • Even worse are battles where, just to make melee pointless, some foes have Super Armor, preventing your punches from doing anything. Have fun charging your energy and spamming Blast attacks.
    • Which doesn't always help, since Super Armor also makes enemies immune to flinching. This means they can knock you out of a channeled Ki blast while you're hitting them with it.
• Convection, Schmonvection: Ruined Planet Namek looks a lot like hell, with rivers of magma aplenty. Not that it affects any of the combatants fighting there. Not even those.
• Co-Op Multiplayer: With 2-v-2 and 3-v-3 battles included.
• Cute Monster Girl: Female Majins are slender and feminine, in comparison to the rotund, funny-faced males of their race.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: Android 18, mirroring her evolution in the show. If you complete her training she'll admit she originally planned to charge your Patroller 100 million zeni for the training but changed her mind, as she found herself having fun with you.
• Dirty Old Man: In the absence of traditional Dragon Ball Dirty Old Man Master Roshi, the Elder Kai plays this role.
• Disproportionate Retribution: If Cell goes up against one of his Juniors.
  Cell Jr.: "Hahahaha, boo!"
  Cell: "How dare you act that way to your father! You are nothing but a miserable failure!"
  • Just like in the movie, don't deny the God of Destruction pudding.
• Disc-One Final Boss: The Time Breakers, specifically Mira, are fought at the beginning of the Buu Saga, and after defeating them, the much more powerful Demigra appears and takes the mantle of Big Bad for the rest of the story.
• Do Not Taunt Cthulhu: Demigra tries to control Beerus. Not only does it not work at all, it nearly gets him blown to atoms by a ticked off God of Destruction and results in him assisting the player against Demigra.
• Early-Bird Cameo: One of the forms Tennille, one of the shapeshifters in the marketplace, takes on is that of a majin outfitted to look like a fat version of Beerus.
• Early Game Hell: When a player starts a new game, they pretty much get practically nothing for their Future Warrior, leaving their options in battles very limited. By doing Parallel Quests, leveling up their character, and getting more Supers and Ultimates, the game becomes much more manageable.
• Easily Forgiven: More than a few of the mentors take it badly if you switch to another mentor over them, but fortunately for the player they will always take you back if you want to become their student again.
• Enemy Mine: In a sense. After you beat Ginyu, Frieza, and Cell, they agree to help mentor the Future Warrior as revenge for being controlled by the Time Breakers. Downplayed with Beerus, who isn't really evil.
• Empowered Badass Normal: Mr. Satan. With a little help from some Time Breaker magic, he goes from suicidal overconfident Badass Normal to enough of a threat to challenge a Super Saiyan.
• "Everybody Laughs" Ending: Twice. One after the final battle, and one at the end of The Stinger
• Evil Is Hammy: You can absolutely tell Dameon Clarke and Norio Wakamoto are loving being back in the role of Cell.
• Evil Mentor: In addition to the hero mentors, the Time Patroller can also be mentored by the villains Captain Ginyu, Frieza and Cell. Ginyu wants the Patroller to become the sixth member of the Ginyu Force, Frieza wants them to become his Honor Guard (and eventual right-hand man) and Cell wants to use them (first as a chess piece, then as a potential rival).
• Evil Versus Evil: Percel's mission is to save the Dragon Ball Era from a situation like this: Demon King Piccolo fused with Kami and is leading an army of demons vs the Red Ribbon Army who has an army of Androids. And then to make matters worse, Babidi shows up turning it into a three way battle.
• Exclusive Enemy Equipment: Two different forms: There are a few attacks that the player can never learn, like Goku's Super God Fist^note But it's basically a weaker version of the Super Dragon Fist, which you can learn, so this is no great loss, but there are also canon characters who have movesets that only the computer can use (like a version of Android #18 with her brother's infamous Super Electric Strike ultimate attack).
• Fake Longevity: Xenoverse's MMO based structure brings an unfortunate level of Random Number God into the Parallel Quest design. Sometimes you can't trigger an Ultimate Finish even if you fulfill all the requirements for it. Even when you do, it's not a guarantee you'll get that Ultimate Skill or Super Attack you were farming for. Even worse for clothes and Z-Souls, which may also come with certain conditions before you get lucky enough to acquire them. This makes getting 100% Completion much longer than it needs to be.
• Final Boss: Demigra, the mastermind behind the events of the game, who has two forms.
• Fighting Your Friend: Demigra manages to Mind Control Vegeta, Gohan, Gotenks and even Time Patrol Trunks during his attack on Toki Toki City. And he nearly gets the Future Warrior as well.
• Fish out of Temporal Water: You, the "hero" of the game.
• Forced Level-Grinding: Universe Mode is scaled this way. If a player decides to go straight through it, they will likely start getting easily overpowered in battle, forcing them to do Parallel Quests to level up their custom character's stats.
• Foreshadowing:
  • When Demigra tries to control Beerus, his eyes temporarily go red, then back to normal. This is a clue that the villainous mind control doesn't work on gods.
  • There's also Demigra attempting to control the Future Warrior towards the end of the game. In the second game, Towa pulls it off.
• For Want Of A Nail: Some of the alterations in time happened because of minor changes.
• Fragile Speedster: Raditz and Burter. Beerus also qualifies, but only after you've broken through his Super Armor (with the armor he's a Lightning Bruiser).
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: In the story, Ginyu can use the Body Switch even after he claims a new body (which makes sense, as it would be useless as a technique otherwise), but in 1v1 mode, both the Future Warrior and Ginyu cannot use Body Change more than one successful time in a match. Better use it wisely.
  • When Beerus appears in the story, Trunks says he can't measure his power level. But your scouter has something to say about it: He's level 66.
  • When Demigra attacks Tokitoki City, he destroys the giant hourglass at the center. However, if you choose to go back to the Time Nest instead of continuing to the final battle, you'll find that it's still fine.
  • When the Time Patroller and Goku fight the Villainous!Z-Warriors near the end of story mode, as the fight goes on it's obvious that they are possessed due to the dialog when their health gets lowered enough and because of their looks. But in vs.mode neither one of them talk like they are possessed or anything. They just have their same intros with certain characters like nothing is wrong or different looking in the slightest.
• Gang Up on the Human: Invoked. Expect the very first thing the AI enemy locks onto to be you, since they lock on to the closest enemy and you're almost always in front. Given the competence level of your computer controlled teammates, it's easy to understand why.
• Gendered Outfit: The Great Saiyaman costume changes depending on the wearer's race, being Gohan/Great Saiyaman 1's version on male characters and Videl/Great Saiyaman 2's version on females. However, since their respective helmets (and Gohan's tournament-exclusive bandana-sunglasses setup) are accessories, either sex can wear them as they wish.
  • If a female character equips any top that would partially expose her breasts (such as Beerus' outfit or the Fusion vest), the game automatically adds the bra/tube-top seen if one completely undresses a female character.
• Gender-Restricted Gear: A few of the costumes, the most prominent examples being the Student Blazer and Student Skirt, which are Distaff/Spear Counterparts to one another.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: Whenever Towa interferes with time and buffs someone, their eyes glow an ominous shade of red.
• God of Evil: Demigra, who is responsible for the corrupting magic and even has the title of Demon God.
• Godzilla Threshold: Played deliberately in the post-game chapter. It is revealed that, before his passing, Demigra had set up various wormholes throughout time and space as backup initiatives. One of which was to unleash Broly on Goku during his battle with Frieza on Namek, at which point Goku would be nowhere near the level of strength he'd need be to survive that.
  • This gets thrown right back by none other than Bardock, who has Vegeta help him transform into a Great Ape to take the fight to Broly.
  • GT Pack 1 showed another of these wormholes, this time it picks up Golden Great Ape Baby Vegeta and Super 17. Where they ended up has yet to be shown...
  • GT Pack 2 answers the question. The wormhole also sucks up Omega Shenron, and they're all brought together to kill Goku/Gogeta and now you as well. You need to fight them. All at once.
• Going to Give It More Energy: Towa and Mira alter history by giving the villains additional energy that allows them to succeed in their fight against the heroes.
• Gosh Darn It to Heck!: The Supreme Kai of Time speaks like this instead of swearing when angry. Even when the person she is talking about is Beerus or Demigra.
• Grand Theft Me: Ginyu's Body Change Ultimate. Which he uses in Story Mode to take control of your character for a while.
• Guys Smash, Girls Shoot: Zig-Zagged for custom characters, Humans play this straight, but Majins and Saiyans avert this:
  • Human males have the second best regular physical attacks and the best supers while having average regular ki attacks and ki supers, females have the best regular ki attacks(tied with male Saiyans) and ki supers while having average regular physical attacks and physical supers.
  • Saiyan males have the best regulars attacks and the worst supers in both physical and ki based attacks, females have the worst regular attacks and the second best supers in both categories.
  • Majin females are better than the males in all attack categories, the males have much higher health.
• Hand Wave: It was established during the Cell Saga that time traveling doesn't actually alter the past, but instead creates an entirely new timeline where the different events played out. In the game, Trunks mentions at one point that the time machines used for the parallel quests have been modified by the Supreme Kai of Time so that they actually time travel without creating new timelines.
• Hard Work Hardly Works: It took Demigra 75 million years to amass enough power to escape the Crack of Time. During the Final Boss, Goku uses Instant Transmission to warp in and out effortlessly.
• Heroic Mime: The Time Patroller says nothing outside of battle cries. In cutscenes, they are completely silent.
• Hero Killer: Surprisingly, Hercule in the distorted history. The cutscene implies that he actually fatally wounded Goku. Yikes!
• Hero of Another Story: One of the NPCs named Percel mentions that he's dealing with time distortions during the Dragon Ball era. He mentions that King Piccolo absorbed Kami (which would make him too strong for the heroes of that era) and that King Piccolo's army is at war with the Red Ribbon Army, who now have Android soldiers. And then to make matters worse, Babidi shows up turning it into a three way battle. The poor guy definitely has his hands full.
• Shotoclone: Teen gohan with his second moveset, consisting of Super dragon flight (Shoryuken), Evil whirlwind (Tatsumaki senpuukyaku), and the Masenko (Hadouken).
• Hijacked by Ganon: Played with — Demigra usurps the Big Bad role from Towa and Mira in classic Ganon fashion, but he's a new character, not an old one.
• Hijacking Cthulhu: Either Captain Ginyu or the Future Warrior are capable of this with the Body Change technique; it works on anyone, even Beerus and Whis, both whom are literally gods.
• Hitbox Dissonance: It's entirely possible for melee attacks to completely miss, or for you to get hit with beams that you clearly aren't touching. Or beams that have already disappeared.
• Hub City: Tokitoki City serves as the base of operations for the Time Patrol, from which you can meet with other players, arrange online fights, or disembark on quests.
• Hyperspace Arsenal: If custom characters have supers and/or ultimates that use weapons, they pull the weapon out of nowhere and do the attack and the weapon disappears afterwards. Even if they have a similar weapon that is used in the attack equipped, they will still pull a weapon out of nowhere. However, the player can deliberately subvert this (at least with the sword moves) if they choose to equip their Time Patroller with a sword for their accessory.
• In Spite of a Nail: As long as major events play out the same time is considered fixed. Some alterations include:
  • Gohan not getting a hit on Raditz but impressing Piccolo enough with his attempt.
  • Krillin being the one to chop off Vegeta's tail and Gohan not going Giant Ape.
  • Guldo taking Jeice's place as the last Ginyu Force member to die rather than being the first.
  • Future Cell being in his perfect form when fighting a returned Trunks.
  • Vegito is never formed and Goku and Vegeta never go inside Super Buu's body .
  • Goku not having his energy restored by Porunga's third wish, with the Future Warrior instead supplying the extra boost needed to destroy Kid Buu.
• In Their Own Image: Demigra's plan is to more or less cause a Time Crash and then rebuild it all in his own image.
• In the Past, Everyone Will Be Famous: Understandably, considering that you bump into characters from the series.
• Informed Ability: Much is made in the narration about Mira's strength and worthiness as a rival to the Future Warrior. In practice, he's a little underwhelming.
• Involuntary Dance: The Dancing Parapara attack from GT, which forces any enemies in the area of effect to dance, leaving them open to attacks from your allies (or yourself if you're quick, since your character's dance animation ends about 1 second earlier).
• Joke Character: Appule, Raspberry, and each character's respective Palette Swaps. All are incredibly weak and slow, most don't have ultimates, and they have the lowest amounts of health in the game. They'll be beaten unconscious in a few seconds against Hercule.
• Kamehame Hadoken: The first half is in this game, of course as well as many variants of the trope.
• Katanas Are Just Better: There are a handful of katanas and swords the Time Patroller can equip as accessories. They do nothing on their own, but if the Patroller learns some of Trunks' sword moves, they can use them without relying on the Hyperspace Arsenal to explain it.
• Ki Manipulation: A staple to Dragon Ball fighting games.
• Large Ham: Cell seems to get hammier and hammier with every game he appears in, with Xenoverse being his hammiest appearance yet.
  Cell (if the player gets a Z-Rank): "Splendid! Now, this was a real fight! I'd totally hug you if that was something I did!"
  Cell (if the player gets a D-Rank: "You couldn't even kill TIME like that!
• Leeroy Jenkins: Trunks of all people, usually so calm and composed, attacks Demigra's illusion without a second thought to his own safety. His father would be proud.
• Lethal Chef: The Supreme Kai of Time is not a good cook.
• Life Drain: Averted with the Drain series of skills. They inflict damage and allow you to absorb either Ki, Stamina, or both, but none of the three actually allow you to drain an enemy's health.
• Lightning Bruiser: Golden Great Ape Baby is enormous, but leaps and spins with a speed that belies his great size, and the player will quickly find his attacks are much harder to dodge than those of previous Great Apes. He also hits harder, to the point where he can KO even a level 80 character in a few hits.
• Limit Break: A fighter's ultimate attack.
• Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: Ki Blast Supers tend to scale massively, to the point of, if melee attacks were knives, Ki supers would be chainsaws. Especially so if Ace is a Saiyan, since Super Saiyan allows the player to spam them.
• Lip Lock: The English dubbing doesn't match up with the characters' lip movements at times, mostly with pre-fight comments.
• Living MacGuffin: The Supreme Kai of Time's bird, Tokitoki, is revealed to be this due to him being tied to the Time Nest. Demigra gets a significant power up near the end of the game when he seals Tokitoki inside a small ball and consumes him. Tokitoki is also responsible for allowing the Future Warrior to go back in time and stop Demigra's Near-Villain Victory.
  • All There in the Manual tells us that Tokitoki has the ability to create time, which explains how he was able to send the Future Warrior back to the moment after Demigra dealt them a fatal blow as well as how Demigra planned to recreate history after nuking the Time Vault.
• Luck-Based Mission: Getting certain equipment or skills to drop in Parallel Quests
• Luck Manipulation Mechanic: The Resurrection 'F' Pack's Elder Kai mentor will randomly tell you one of 3 messages regarding an apple tree, each message boosts your drop rate chance for 1 offline Parallel Quest. If the message is too cloudy to read, you have normal luck. If the message invokes an apple, you have increased luck. If the message invokes a golden apple, you have the highest possible luck allowed.
• The Magnificent: Lots of characters in this game have fancy titles (Emperor Frieza, Super Perfect Cell, etc) but Beerus is the only one of them who gets his title incorporated into his actual name. Specifically, he named as "God of Destruction Beerus".
  • Data in the game's code reveals that Demigra would have broken Beerus's monopoly on this trope, as he was originally designed to be playable under the name "Demon God Demigra".
• Make Wrong What Once Went Right / Set Right What Once Went Wrong: The whole purpose of Universe Mode in Xenoverse is trope-to-trope combat between these two. See Rubber-Band History below for details. In the end, the Player Character does this to their own past after Demigra's Near-Villain Victory, allowing them and Goku to end to put an end to Demigra's plans.
• Malaproper: Created male characters using voice #8, aka: Abridged!Nappa
  "Ten to the Kamehame-HO!"
• Meaningful Name: Dragon Ball XenoVerse, the 15th Dragon Ball game since Budokai. "Xenoverse" is also Greek for "uncharted territory".
  • Overlaps with Incredibly Lame Pun when you realize it's pronounced the same way as one might pronounce Dragon Ball Z-niverse.
• Mighty Glacier: Broly doesn't care about your attacks. Broly doesn't care about your ultimates. Broly doesn't care about anything you throw at him.
• Mind-Control Eyes: Characters who fall under the control of Demigra have glowing red eyes and black markings around their eyes and cheeks.
• Mirror Match: The Elder Kai's third Mentor mission has him pitting the player against an exact copy of themselves, saying that they need to conquer the darkness in their own heart before they can advance; this is represented by the doppelgänger entering Villainous Mode after you knock them out once. The Elder's sparring mission is a more difficult version of the same quest.
• Modesty Shorts: The Student Skirt costume sports a pair of black bike shorts.
• Multiple Endings: A minor example. Specifically the only thing that changes is how the Final Boss is finished off. If you defeat Demigra when Goku arrives, your Future Warrior and Goku both fire off a Kamehameha to finish off Demigra. If you manage to defeat him before Goku arrives, Goku and the other Z Fighters give the Future Warrior their energy so they can unleash a Super Kamehameha.
• Mundane Utility: Vegeta uses the Super Saiyan form to steal a pudding cup from Fat Buu and give it to Lord Beerus.
• My Species Doth Protest Too Much: One of the Frieza Race NPCs in Tokitoki City mentions how Frieza and King Cold were evil, tyrannical mutants, but that not all members of their race are as cruel and heartless as them.
• Mysterious Protector: From the Z-Fighters perspective, the Future Warrior is this and fills the role, appearing to help out of nowhere, then vanishing again.
• Mythology Gag: Many of the emotive poses your created character can do in Tokitoki City, which include Ginyu Force poses, Fusion Dancing, Hercule's mannerisms, Saiyaman's justice poses and Yamcha's infamous death pose.
  • Male CaC voice #8, aka Ghost Nappa, refers to all of the Ginyu Force members by their dairy namesakes: Creamer (Recoome), Yogurt (Guldo), Butter (Burter), Cheese (Jeice), and Lactose (Captain Ginyu)
  • The extra versions of Saibaman (Copyman, Tennenman, etc) are from the NES RPG Dragon Ball Z: Kyōshū! Saiya-jin, while Appule and Raspberry's alternate versions come from its sequel, Dragon Ball Z II: Gekishin Freeza. (Both games were merged into a single SNES remake, Dragon Ball Z: Sūpā Saiya Densetsu.)
    • On the same subject, the Parallel Quest "Super Saiyan Legend" is named after the aforementioned remake and features the same What If? Secret Boss: If the player triggers Goku's Super Saiyan transformation by allowing Frieza to kill Krillin, then keeps Vegeta alive through the end of the quest, Vegeta will himself go Super Saiyan and become an enemy.
  • The achievement "Won't you dance with me?" is a reference to lyrics from the Dragon Ball GT opening theme "DAN DAN Kokoro Hikareteku".
    • Most of the achievements/trophies from the Japanese version are named after lyrics from the Dragon Ball franchise's theme songs, but got renamed for the US release. For example, the trophy for unlocking all character variations was called "We Gotta Power" in Japan and "The Greatest Warriors" in America.
  • The achievement "Grandpa's Memoir" is earned by obtaining the four-star Dragon Ball, the very same one that once belonged to Goku's Grandpa Gohan.
  • When a Saiyan character wears the wig resembling Launch's hair, it turns from blue to blonde when transforming into a Super Saiyan. This is a double reference: the first being the character namesake's change in hair color when switching between a sweet blue-haired girl and a violent blonde; and the second is that, when Akira Toriyama remembered she existed after forgetting about her after the end of the Saiyan saga, he was worried about bringing her back into the story because her hair change would resemble a Super Saiyan transformation and confuse readers and viewers.
  • One of the NPCs mentions having learned shapeshifting from the Southern Transformation Kindergarten, the same school where Oolong and Puar learned shapeshifting. He uses it to cosplay.
  • Future Trunks abruptly attacks your character in order to assess their skills, and after he's satisfied he throws his sword into the air and catches it by casually leaning to one side; this is exactly what he did to Goku after the latter returned to Earth.
  • The Wild Rider costume set is based on clothes Bulma wore on one of the manga covers and in the original anime's first ending animation.
  • One of Gotenks' movesets has Yamcha's Wolf Fang Fist and Tien's Volleyball Fist, referring to the 2009 special Dragon Ball: Yo! Son Goku and His Friends Return!!, where he used both moves against the villain Aka.
  • From late in the Battle of Gods saga: The way the Future Warrior blasts through Demigra's mirage after tag-teaming him with Beerus is similar to how a young Goku defeated King Piccolo.
• Near-Villain Victory: Demigra comes dangerously close to this near the end when he is released from his seal, consumes Tokitoki and nearly takes over the city as a result. He also manages to control the main villains, Vegeta, Gotenks, Gohan, and even Time Patrol Trunks. He also manages to defeat the Future Warrior and Goku. Fortunately, right before he manages to destroy the Time Vault and cause a Time Crash, Tokitoki allows the Future Warrior to go back to the past and prevent Demigra from shooting down Goku, giving them the upper hand.
• New Skill as Reward: The most common way to earn skills and Z-Souls is by completing Parallel Quests...often with a horrible Random Number God involved. The more you move forward with the main quest, the more skills can be unlocked at the shop.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Sealing Demigra within the crack of time seems like a good idea, in theory. ...Until it enables him to reach out across time and space to muddle with history. Not only that, it gives him a safe place outside of time to camp after erasing the universe so he could both survive and recreate history.
• No Campaign for the Wicked: Played with. While there's no actual story path, there are several Parallel Quests in which you side with the bad guys and take on the Z-Fighters.
• No Kill Like Over Kill: You get a higher score if you finish fights with an ultimate and while transformed. Even if you turn Super Saiyan and use Final Flash on lowly Frieza soldiers.
• No-Sell: Beerus is suddenly controlled by a Time Breaker and about to destroy Earth with a giant energy sphere. He prepares to toss the sphere and instead aims for Demigra, showing it takes more to corrupt a God of Destruction. He later tries to control Goku, but it doesn't work then either due to him having become a god before.
  • The ability "Wall of Defence" essentially allows the player to perform this; they become an invincible shield for as long as they have stamina, blocking any attack that makes contact with them. Rather darkly, the technique is modeled after the moment when Piccolo saved Gohan, which was anything but No Selling.
  • Vanisher Guard uses an aura to do a Badass Back No-Sell to anything.
  • The DLC Master Tien Z-Soul makes any move that's a Kamehameha useless.
• Not Afraid of You Anymore: Teen and Adult!Gohan's interactions with Raditz and Frieza are a downplayed example.
• Not Quite Dead: Mira, as revealed in The Stinger, survived his final fight with the Time Patroller (albeit reduced to a tiny, quivering mass of organic matter).
• Oh, Crap!:
  • The Supreme Kai of Time has one when she realizes Demigra is going to try and control Beerus.
  • Demigra drops the smug attitude the second Beerus stops pretending to be under his control and attacks him.
• Older and Wiser: Frieza is an evil version; if you train under him with a Saiyan Patroller, he'll reveal that he was taken from a point in time after being defeated by the Saiyans, and is determined not to make the same mistake of underestimating them again. Hence, his plan is to train your character as his right hand and have you fight with him when he seeks revenge.
• One-Gender Race: Namekians (which we already knew) and, apparently, Frieza's clan. That, or they're too androgynous for it to matter.
• One-Winged Angel: Demigra has a pretty impressive Final Form he uses for the final battle.
• Only in It for the Money: This is Android 18's motivation as a mentor. She wants you to do well so the Supreme Kai of Time pays her.
• Only Six Faces: Averted. Unlike Dragonball Online or Ultimate Tenkaichi there is an insane amount of depth to the character customization in Xenoverse. You can change anything from hair to body mass to the shape of their face and even their pupils! And that's within the parameters of each of the eight available gender/race combinations!
  • Also averted with the townsfolk, and played with by two Time Patrol soldiers who, every time you reload the area, are cosplaying another pair of characters. This may have been a pre-emptive parody of players, as half the player characters you see are clones of a canon character, and almost all your armor is just other peoples' clothes.
• Optional Boss: The final missions of the GT storyline. The final mission of the first part has you pursuing and fighting Super 17 across several locales, while the final mission of the second part pits you and SS4 Gogeta against Great Ape Baby, Super 17, and Omega Shenron in a grudge match.
• Pet the Dog: Should you have befriended your mentor, and your health become very low in a Parallel Quest, your mentor can come to the rescue and assist in the fight. Even villainous mentors, like Ginyu, Frieza, and Cell.
• Playing with Fire: Nuova Shenron, whose moves are all based around a fire theme.
• Power Gives You Wings: One of Videl's attacks is a knee-kick that is accompanied by wings sprouting from her back for a moment.
• Power Level: Before starting an online fight, the combatants' power levels are shown on the screen. Players can also use scouters to see the experience level of other combatants during battle.
• Pre-Character Customization Gameplay: Before you actually get to make your Time Patroller, the game puts you in the role of Goku battling Frieza, Cell, and Kid Buu to give you the gist of what gameplay is like.
• Purple Is Powerful: Characters buffed up by the Time Breakers are enveloped in a purple-and-black energy aura.
• Puny Earthlings: If your Future Warrior is human, get ready to hear this attitude a LOT- from Vegeta, to Gotenks, to Frieza, to Cell... all are quick to be dismissive of you. Luckily you can prove them VERY wrong.
• Pun-Based Title: Sort of. See Meaningful Name.
• Reality Warping: Some abilities are physics-altering — e.g., Candy Beam and Time Control.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: In-universe. Time Patrol Trunks states that his opinion of GT Trunks increases significantly after the latter appears and takes out two members of the powered-up Neo Ginyu Force with one attack.
• Ret-Gone: Time Patrol Trunks falls in danger of this when the Time Breakers cause his past self to be killed by the Androids.
• Rubber-Band History: The villains are meddling with time, changing events for the worse (such as allowing Raditz to survive his fight with Goku by letting him dodge Gohan's attack and Piccolo's Special Beam Cannon), and Trunks and the Player Character must repair the damage they've caused.
  • Also, the trailers advertise that some battles can change depending on your actions, such as having a normally 1v1 fight becoming a 3v3 fight.
• Rule of Three: Played with — As mentioned above you can select up to 3 characters for fights or Parallel Quests, but depending on the quest additional fighters can then join your party. It almost starts to feel unfair in quests like Super Saiyan Legend where you can have 5 characters all beating up on 1 harried villain.
• Scenery Porn: The Glacier and Space stages in particular are frigging gorgeous.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: Demigra is trapped in the Crack of Time. Distorting history and changing events for the worst weakens the seal on his prison, allowing him to influence events further and eventually escape.
• Secret A.I. Moves: The "Darkness Mixer" power up (The type that's simply an aura, not the full transformation) is exclusive to enemy characters. Additionally, while the moves used by the villainous characters and Demigra can be used if you select the playable "Villainous" characters, they cannot be equipped to your custom character, and Demigra has several moves unique to him alone, including his ultimate and all of his final form's moves. Raspberry also has Beam Rifle, a skill he and his Palette Swaps use in lieu of the ability to fire ki balls. A full list of the skills your character can never learn can be found here.
• Secret Character: There are several, which are unlocked through different ways. Bardock and Broly are unlocked through a couple of post-game story chapters, SSJ4 Goku is unlocked by completing all the Parallel Quests, and SSJ4 Gogeta, Super 17, and Omega Shenron are unlocked through using the Dragon Balls to wish for a new character.
• Sequel Hook: The ending features Towa finding Mira's broken chestplate and a small remain of Mira and flying off with it stating she will rebuild Mira to become stronger and swear revenge for their defeat.
• Shock and Awe: Androids 17 and 18 have this ability via their Super Electric Strike ultimate, and the Future Warrior can learn it too.
• Shoot the Medic First: This strategy can be employed to an extent in single-player offline 3v3 battles, thanks to the fallen teammate revival mechanic adapted from Battle of Z. When one member of a trio is down, one teammate will react almost immediately, taking focus off the enemy to go and revive his/her comrade and leaving him/herself more vulnerable in the process as the other ally carries on fighting. Usually the volunteer medic is the lower-selected of the two teammates remaining—which means the third member unless they're the one that's down, in which case it falls on the second member—and this is true for both the team the player is on^note though the player obviously can choose to go help heal as well if they wish, the other guy is usually already on the scene and the all-CPU controlled team.
• Shop Fodder: Hercule Badges, which come in several rarity tiers of increasing value, and exist only to be sold for Zeni.
• Shout-Out:
  • One of the emotive poses your characters can do looks just like one of Arale's signature poses.◊
  • Custom male voice #8 is actually Ghost Nappa, and Takahata's lines were written by fellow members of the TFS cast. As such, allusions to the Abridged series series were aplenty:
    • Instead of singing "Hush Little Baby", he sings "Cat Loves Food."
    • His name for Jeice's Crusher Ball? "Space Australia!"
• Side Quest: Parallel Quest and Mentor missions that help boost your custom characters levels and skills, as well as costumes.

• Skill Point Reset: One of the wishes you can make from Shenron is to respec your attribute points.
• Smug Super: Cell, at least if you face him as an Earthling:
  Cell: I have no time for facing the weak and pathetic. Run away while you still can, loser!
• Spared by the Adaptation: Downplayed—unlike in the Manga and the Anime, Guldo manages to outlive Burter, Jeice and Recoome in the altered timeline.
  • And unlike in his TV special, Bardock survives the destruction of Planet Vegeta by being sucked in a wormhole.
• Sphere of Destruction: Beerus' Ultimate Attack is called this by name. There are others of this such as Frieza's Death Ball or Kid Buu's Vanishing Ball.
• Spiritual Successor: One to Dragon Ball Online. Time Patrol Trunks, Towa, and Mira return, and the game is very much structured like an MMO, with many mechanics carried over from Dragon Ball Online.
• The Stations of the Canon: They exist, and it's your job to enforce them.
• Stat-O-Vision: Players can use scouters, which can display a combatant's level, attacks, HP, and ki. Scouters can also pinpoint the location of hidden items. Strangely enough, you can use this feature even if you don't have a Scouter equipped. Scouters only add a neat little colored scouter to the overlay.
• Stealth Hi/Bye: The Future Warrior does this almost every time they show up to help the Z-Fighters.
• Suicidal Overconfidence: Demigra not only got the inane notion in his head that he could enslave the "freaking God of Destruction" as the Supreme Kai of Time aptly puts it, but actually acted on that thought. Even knowing he's only there as an illusion, the terror on his face upon realizing the plan's gone utterly fubar is palpable.
• Superboss: Three notable parallel quests offered by the Resurrection F DLC. The first tasks you with defeating Towa and Mira, the former of which has enhanced super armor, in 5 minutes or less. The second has you fighting off Golden Frieza and his underlings in a recreation of the invasion of Earth from Resurrection F. The last is a challenge from Goku and Vegeta, who will progress through each and every Super Saiyan form available to them, maxing out at Super Saiyan Blue (called SSGSS in this game). If you meet the ultimate finish requirements for these missions, this trope is taken further: you will be treated to one extra phase in which your primary opponents (Towa and Mira/Golden Frieza/SSGSS Goku and SSGSS Vegeta) gain three life bars, perpetual super armor that can only be temporarily nullified after lots of punishment, extreme damage boosts to all their attacks, and hyper-aggressive AI behavior.
• Super Mode:
  • Saiyans get Super Saiyan in four variations: SSJ 1 and 2 and Super Vegeta 1 and 2. Both versions grant a stat buff (SSJ leans towards physical attacks while Super Vegeta is better at Ki attacks) and make special attacks cost 0 Ki; on the other hand, the Ki meter constantly drains and when it runs out, you de-transform^note But the player can just use one of the power charge moves to keep the transformation up indefinitely. For everyone else, there's Kaioken (in regular, 3x, and 20x forms), which grants a stat buff but drains stamina.
  • The third and final DLC added the Elder Kai's Unlock Potential as a transformation available to all races. It provides a healthy stat boost but, unlike Super Saiyan and Kaioken, it drains neither Ki nor Stamina, meaning that once you activate it it'll probably last until the end of the mission (unless you use a move that expends all your Ki like Nappa's Break Cannon). The primary drawback is that you can't obtain the transformation until 'Level 93, which takes over 1 million XP per level; on the plus side, the Elder Kai's ritual automatically bumps you up to Level 95.
• Super Move Portrait Attack: When an opponent targets you with an ultimate attack, their picture will briefly flash on-screen.
• Super Not-Drowning Skills: Water doesn't ever bother anyone, even if they open their gaper wide open to shout their attacks.
• Superpowered Evil Side: A number of characters, ranging from the thoroughly villainous Frieza and Cell to heroes like Gohan and Gotenks, have special "Villainous" forms you can select after being them in the story mode.
• Tag Team: The enemy AI acts like this - The one you're targeting will often go off and fight an AI teammate if one is around while one you're not targeting will often fly over to start hitting you since you can't easily hit them back right away.
• Tall Poppy Syndrome: If you get a Z-Rank with Yamcha as your master, his reaction shows shades of this.
• Terminator Twosome: Your character and Time Patrol Trunks are one half, Towa and Miira (and after they're defeated, Demigra) are the other.
• This Cannot Be!: Super 17 exclaims this in classic Dragon Ball Villainous Breakdown fashion after being defeated.
• This Is Something He's Got to Do Himself: The Frieza Saga ends with Goku thanking your character for all their help, but asking you to let him take care of Frieza personally.
• Time Abyss: Both Demigra and the Supreme Kai of Time are 75 million years old.
• Time Crash: Demigra's plan is to destroy the Time Vault, more or less erasing history and the universe, all so he can remake the world In Their Own Image.

• Time Master: Mira and Towa are masters of time.
  • Demigra declares himself a God of Time when he consumes Tokitoki.

• Training from Hell: You can receive this from characters in-game; both Vegeta and Piccolo specifically refer to the training as something akin to this. Vegeta delivers.
• Troll: Cell, if you mentor under him, can casually say some really callous remarks. Such as if you're wearing Future Trunks' CC Clothes he comments that he killed Trunks in his timeline, and if you are an Earthling, he comments that if you were around during the Cell Saga, maybe he wouldn't have absorbed so many people.
• The Unfought: Averted with Whis, at least from a gameplay perspective, who will be a fully playable character with a full moveset. However because of the time-travel nature of the plot, many characters such as the mid-forms of Frieza and Cell, will not be in the game.
  • Enforced with Towa. She lets Mira do the fighting for her.
  • Averted, now that she's a playable DLC character.
• Unwitting Pawn: Towa and Mira are this to Demigra, as their meddling of history weakens Demigra's seal. The two don't even know of the latter's existence by the time the story ends.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: A good number of Parallel Quests have you fighting the heroes with the help of the villains, but one of them stands out: in order to get the Ultimate Finish, you must kill (and you do kill him, judging by the dialogue) Krillin in order to enrage Goku into becoming a Super Saiyan so you can defeat him. Thank goodness it's just a Parallel Quest...
• Villainous Breakdown:
  • Demigra's calm, cocky, demeanor is completely shattered near the end of the game when his plans fail, ala many a Dragon Ball villain.
  • Frieza suffers from this in Parallel Quest 16: Super Saiyan Legend. If you fulfill the quest requirements, you can make him break down more by having Goku arrive and give him his classic Badass Boast speech.
  • Cell melts down in two Parallel Quests, 23: Clash! Perfect Cell!, and 27: Artificial Warriors (where he only appears if the Time Patroller kills three Cell Jrs first).
  • Super 17 has a truly Large Ham breakdown in DLC Quest 4: The Ultimate Android ("THIS CAN'T BE HAPPENING! I'M SUPER SEVENTEEEEEEN!!!").
  • Omega Shenron, by contrast, has a subdued breakdown in DLC Quest 5: The Shadow Dragons, but he's clearly seething too ("Who are you? Who the heck are you?!").
• Virtual Paper Doll: Created characters can wear a wide variety of clothing, from the tried-and-true classics like the Turtle Hermit School uniform and Saiyan armor to Chi-Chi and Launch's duds, Orange Star High School's uniform, the Great Saiyaman's costume, and Lady Baba's hat and robes.
• Voices Are Mental: When the Body Change is used, all voices are swapped. It becomes hilarious in certain situations when you see Ginyu's voice coming out of a cute female body, or Beerus, the God of Destruction, emitting female fighting grunts.
• Walking Shirtless Scene: Male characters can play this way if they so choose.
• The War Sequence: In a postgame story mission, you get to join Bardock in his last stand against Frieza, fighting off his men in orbit above Planet Vegeta before going toe-to-toe with the mad tyrant.
• The Watcher: Mefla, one of the NPCs in Toki Toki City. He's a grey-skinned Namekian you can find in the Industrial district.
• Wham Episode:
  • Being the first console Dragon Ball game in a long time with an original story, it is surprising seeing past events becoming screwed up for the Z-Fighters, thanks to the plans of Towa and Mira.
  • The final saga of the game starts with Frieza, Cell, Kid Buu, Gohan, Vegeta, and Gotenks all under Demigra's mind control. Then Demigra invades Tokitoki City...
• What If?:
  • The whole story of the game seems to be a what-if, with you trying to fix everything back to normal.
  • One bonus mission poses the question, what would happen if Bardock, the father of Goku, went toe-to-toe with the Legendary Super Saiyan Broly?
  • Parallel Quests also feature hypothetical situations in DBZ, such as the Ginyu Force invading earth.
• Would Hurt a Child: Broly, at least if the line he gives when facing Krillin is anything to go by.
  Broly: "I'll destroy that hairless child..."
  Krillin: "Why do these things always happen to me?'''"
• You Are a Credit to Your Race: Earthlings tend to get this a lot, given how pathetically weak their race as a whole is. Vegeta as a mentor is surprised that he doesn't mind having a human for a student, and Captain Ginyu as a mentor wonders if the Time Patroller is an elite Mutant like himself (and all the other Ginyu Force members).
• You Killed My Father: Brother, actually, in Towa's case, her brother being Dabura, Babidi's Dragon whom Buu devoured.
• Younger Mentor, Older Disciple: Gotenks is among your character's possible mentors. No exact age is given, but it is implied they were summoned and not born from Shenron, so it's very likely your character is older than both Goten and Trunks.