Toriyama makes this literal: Heroes and villains release power from inside themselves as their bodies change shape, as light and fire gathers around them, as the ground shakes. By placing yourself within a fictional space, whether it's medieval Europe or a 31st-century space station, you can rethink yourself in proximity to that space and its context-and see how it shapes you.ĭragon Ball is ultimately a story about transformation, about the idea that people can change to become more than they are. It’s an image that you can then take into a play space, letting it operate under the rarefied set of rules that govern it. A created character is like a photograph of a person, fundamentally limited but complete.

Talented critics before me have written about the possibilities and limitations of the engines in videogames that let you build your own characters, how they create and constrain self-realization. It’s not for an imagined audience, but for the person whose character gets to enter their favorite stories. Fanfic, like *Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2, *isn’t meant to be good in a traditional sense. Mary Sue characters often invite accusations of bad writing, but that criticism misses the point of self-insert characters.

It's a trope common to all fandoms, and Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 is helping me understand why. In fiction, the move is known as the Mary Sue: a character written into a story in order to allow the author to live out their own fantasies, whether that means romancing their favorite hero or just being the badassest badass that ever assed a bad. It accommodates a particular sort of fan service, one that lets enthusiasm mutate into participation. It’s goofy nonsense designed around the story-breaking premise that you, the player, need to be included in everything. If that premise sounds like the stuff of fanfiction, it absolutely is. To do this, you create your own original character to fight alongside the heroes from the manga and anime, jumping from critical moment to critical moment: standing on the sidelines at every important battle, delivering the saving blows. As a 'Time Patroller,' your job is to maintain the Dragon Ball timeline, even as evil trans-dimensional wizards and warriors try to muck it up.

Game dragon ball xenoverse 2