Dragon Ball Xenoverse 3 is officially on the way, and that instantly puts one big question on the table: how do you follow a game that somehow stayed alive for nearly a decade?
That is the weirdly impressive legacy of Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2. After the sequel announcement at Dragon Ball Games Battle Hour over the weekend, fans are now looking back at just how long the second game has lasted. It outlived most Dragon Ball titles in terms of active support, constant updates, and community attention, and it is still getting one final DLC this summer.
That kind of run is no joke. For a lot of Dragon Ball fans, Xenoverse 2 became the all-in-one package, whether you wanted casual split-screen fights with your favourite characters or a story mode that drops you into iconic franchise moments through its timeline-bending setup. It has always been one of the more complete Dragon Ball game experiences around, and that is exactly why Xenoverse 3 cannot afford to play it too safe.
For Malaysian and SEA players, this matters because anime arena fighters and action RPG brawlers tend to live or die on long-term replay value. If a Dragon Ball game is going to sit in your rotation for years, it cannot just survive on fan service. It needs systems that still feel good after hundreds of hours, not mechanics that become annoying the second ranked matches get sweaty.
That is where Xenoverse 2's biggest issues come in.
The foundation is still strong. Conton City, the social hub, remains one of the series' smartest ideas and should absolutely return, just on a much bigger scale. Parallel Quests also deserve another shot, but they need less frustrating RNG and more varied objectives so they feel less repetitive over time. And of course, character creation still feels like the secret sauce of Xenoverse. Making your own fighter is a huge part of the fantasy, so Xenoverse 3 would be wasting a massive opportunity if it does not expand that system with more body types and visual transformation options.
But the area that needs the biggest upgrade is combat.
Xenoverse 2 can still be fun in a fight, but it also shows its age hard. The stiffness is more obvious now, and some systems are way too easy to exploit. Stamina breaks are the clearest example. Once you get trapped in one of those long combo sequences, the match can feel basically over. That kind of cheesy momentum swing might have been tolerable before, but players today are a lot less forgiving when a fighting system feels unfair or janky.
If Xenoverse 3 wants to stand out, it needs cleaner, smoother battles. Better hit feedback, more expressive combo chains, and fewer cheap tactics would go a long way. That is the core of the whole game, bro. If the fighting still feels clunky, no amount of nostalgia is going to save it.
The story side also needs more ambition.
Xenoverse 2 did a solid job using timeline distortions to remix events from Dragon Ball Z and Dragon Ball Super without completely wrecking canon. Even when it got a bit messy, it still worked as a way to revisit major moments. But doing another round of recap-heavy story content would feel stale.
A more ambitious direction would be to push into a multiverse-level disaster inspired by Super Dragon Ball Heroes, the official non-canon manga known for throwing together characters from all across Dragon Ball history. That setup could give Xenoverse 3 much crazier stakes, and more importantly, let players make meaningful choices that split into different timelines.
That would instantly make the story feel more memorable than just replaying the same arcs again with a small twist.
On top of all that, the basic quality-of-life stuff still matters too: cleaner menus, faster navigation, and fewer loading screens. Those things are not flashy, but they make a huge difference in a game designed to keep people around for years.
Xenoverse 3 does not need a total reinvention. It just needs to keep what worked, modernise what feels old, and finally stop repeating the parts fans already know by heart. If Bandai Namco gets that balance right, this could be more than a safe sequel. It could be the Dragon Ball game that finally pushes the series forward again.
Source: Polygon