There are certain things that I have been waiting for in unbridled anticipation for many years now. The opportunity to wander into a lab experiment and gain superpowers. The inevitable moment when I abuse said superpowers for either personal gain or practical jokes. That moment of realisation that I have become a supervillain and, actually, I’m okay with that. But there is something that I’ve been waiting for even longer than all that: the chance to play an original and new story in a Dragonball Z video game.

One of these things will be coming to pass next month. I will give you a moment to decide which one.

Yeah. It’s the Dragonball Z one.

Of all the anime out there, Dragonball is one that has enjoyed a bit more success when it comes to video game adaptations. The Budoki series was a fun if occasionally unbalanced and frustrating fighting series. Budoki Tenkaichi took those and turned them into 3D battles, though they were limited by the technology of the time and didn’t quite have the impact that the developer was hoping for. Still, the games have usually been decent. Which is more than we can say about the live action movies.

The running theme with all the adaptations has been this: you play through as Goku and his allies, playing out the events of one of the most influential anime’s of all time. And that is fun and all, but at some point, fans of this series have wanted a chance to create their own mark on this storied franchise. To be their own character. To be the most super of saiyans.

Xenoverse is our first chance to do this. With a story created especially for this game and the chance to pick between five playable races (Earthling, Saiyan, Namekian, Majin, or one of Frieza’s unnamed race), it gives fans a golden opportunity to finally fight alongside the characters we grew up desperately wishing we were. With hundreds of skills to equip and visual customisations to apply to your character, Developer Dimps, who crafted the well-received Budokai games, look to be trying to please fans by offering the kind of customisation we’ve grown to expect from RPGs rather than traditional fighting games.

Needless to say, I am very excited for this game and what it promises to be. The signs are there that it will be a solid entry in the franchise and will be a suitable celebration of the 30^th anniversary of the Dragonball manga’s first collection. The voice actors are there. The animation looks detailed and stylised to mimic that of the anime. The plot seems to revolve around time travel, a theme that featured heavily in the show and comic. The most recent trailer, which is linked below, shows a fluid and frantic type of combat, which is exactly what fans of the series will be wanting to see.

The plot, as you might expect in something this heavily rooted in Japan, is more than a little bit insane. Someone from the future (Trunks, in his Time Patrol role from Dragonball Online) has caught wind of a plot to unmake time by changing the events of the series, leading him to wish (using the eponymous Dragonballs) for an “ally capable of helping him” defeat this plot. And out steps the original character. The trailer shows him as a Saiyan but this might be any of the aforementioned races. You and Trunks then travel back in time to various points in the series to undo the damage the timeline, allowing you to fight alongside and against some of the most iconic characters in anime.

So colour me excited by this one. Its something that fans of this storied series have been looking forward to for a long time and, with a little bit of luck, we won’t be disappointed. I mean, as long as they let me kamehameha the crap out of bad guys, I’m pretty much sold. Even the recently announced two week delay isn’t going to deter me from this one.

Dragonball Xenoverse is out on PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, and PC in Japan on February 5^th, North America on February 17^th, and Europe on Feburary 27^th.

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