Let's put it this way:
If you want to feel like a genius and a god, this game is the place to do it. Most players are dumb, the devs are dumber, and the game doesn't tell you or anyone else how to play - so once you figure it out, it takes no effort at all to outshine everybody by accident. It's akin to playing a round on Halo where you're the only player with a gun and nobody else understands what bullets or projectiles are.

If you scroll through the community feed, it's all fan characters, shades of pink and purple, glitter, just nothing at all you'd think when you hear "Dragon Ball fan base." That as opposed to the community feeds of Xenoverse 1, FighterZ, and Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot, which have the more IP-iconic color palettes with very basic but bold shades of red, yellow, some orange, and those grassy, rocky backgrounds with a tinted blue sky. If that doesn't give you an idea of how low the bar is.. I mean, welcome home, I guess.

I can't stress the stupidity enough, but I'll top it off with this: on common occasion, I've come across players with 1,000+ hours in the game playing like they're only 12 hours in, and more often than not, they tell you that you're playing it wrong when your score is consistently 3-5x theirs. Most people rely on low-damage, high-risk, high-cost, spray-and-pray coin tosses and ego for a very long time. There are even players out there with 6,000+ hours at that level. Even people running around with cheats are stupid to the point that they're no more difficult to beat than the average fodder bot in a campaign stage. When I say you'll feel like a genius and a god, I mean it. These people are that dumb.

To be extra clear, there IS a good game underneath all of the badness and stupidity that drown it out. The netcode is a complete nightmare, so online play (especially PvP) is often a test of network RNG more than a contest of player familiarity and skill. Among other things, one of the core elements Xenoverse 1 and 2 target is, of course, online cooperative play. The problem? Only one attack can hit at a time. Every attack in the game - every single one - includes some extent of i-frames for the victim, which means there is 0 overlap permitted. Some i-frames are more brief than others, so it's not like you can't dogpile, but dogpiling typically gets a maximum of 2 players' worth of damage through at any given time, so when you've got six people all trying to squeeze into that tiny window and mostly hurling the victim around instead of damaging them, it goes horribly slowly. If you play by yourself, you're free to deal destructive attack chains and special attacks while learning how to actually play. The good? Rules are relatively lore-accurate, character move sets complement their statistic inclinations but do not mandate them, and there's always more to learn about the game. There is a LOT of game to explore, and I don't just mean the bonus packs (although it hurts me to say that's where the most enjoyable aspects of the game are).

But yeah. Stupid people everywhere, bad devs who refuse to stop adding downgrades with every update, it's a mess - but the good things about the core gameplay are there, you just have to avoid other people (or find a rare not-moron player) to find them.

Let's put it this way: If you want to feel like a genius and a god, this game is the place to do it. Most players are dumb, the devs are dumber, and the game doesn't tell you or anyone else how to play - so once you figure it out, it takes no effort at all to outshine everybody by accident. It's akin to playing a round on Halo where you're the only player with a gun and nobody else understands what bullets or projectiles are. If you scroll through the community feed, it's all fan characters, shades of pink and purple, glitter, just nothing at all you'd think when you hear "Dragon Ball fan base." That as opposed to the community feeds of Xenoverse 1, FighterZ, and Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot, which have the more IP-iconic color palettes with very basic but bold shades of red, yellow, some orange, and those grassy, rocky backgrounds with a tinted blue sky. If that doesn't give you an idea of how low the bar is.. I mean, welcome home, I guess. I can't stress the stupidity enough, but I'll top it off with this: on common occasion, I've come across players with 1,000+ hours in the game playing like they're only 12 hours in, and more often than not, they tell you that you're playing it wrong when your score is consistently 3-5x theirs. Most people rely on low-damage, high-risk, high-cost, spray-and-pray coin tosses and ego for a very long time. There are even players out there with 6,000+ hours at that level. Even people running around with cheats are stupid to the point that they're no more difficult to beat than the average fodder bot in a campaign stage. When I say you'll feel like a genius and a god, I mean it. These people are [i]that dumb.[/i] To be extra clear, there IS a good game underneath all of the badness and stupidity that drown it out. The netcode is a complete nightmare, so online play (especially PvP) is often a test of network RNG more than a contest of player familiarity and skill. Among other things, one of the core elements Xenoverse 1 and 2 target is, of course, online cooperative play. The problem? Only one attack can hit at a time. Every attack in the game - every single one - includes some extent of i-frames for the victim, which means there is 0 overlap permitted. Some i-frames are more brief than others, so it's not like you can't dogpile, but dogpiling typically gets a maximum of 2 players' worth of damage through at any given time, so when you've got six people all trying to squeeze into that tiny window and mostly hurling the victim around instead of damaging them, it goes horribly slowly. If you play by yourself, you're free to deal destructive attack chains and special attacks while learning how to actually play. The good? Rules are relatively lore-accurate, character move sets complement their statistic inclinations but do not mandate them, and there's always more to learn about the game. There is a LOT of game to explore, and I don't just mean the bonus packs (although it hurts me to say that's where the most enjoyable aspects of the game [i]are[/i]). But yeah. Stupid people everywhere, bad devs who refuse to stop adding downgrades with every update, it's a mess - but the good things about the core gameplay are there, you just have to avoid other people (or find a rare not-moron player) to find them.