Best Dragon Ball Games For Creating Custom Characters

Key Takeaways

• Dragon Ball
  games offer fans the chance to create custom characters in the universe.
• The Breakers
  has generic visuals but offers customization options for player characters.
• The
  Xenoverse
  series lets players choose from major warrior races and customize extensively.

Every fan of the Dragon Ball franchise has played pretend by doing the iconic super saiyan scream. On top of being hilarious, it’s just fun to imagine becoming a walking powerhouse, complete with the iconic spiky blonde hair and laser beam blasts.

Of course, lore-wise, there aren’t actually many saiyans left. However, there have been a good number of Dragon Ball video games over the years aiming to rectify this, featuring character creation to varying degrees and allowing players to build their dream avatar as one of the series’ various powerful races. What follows are the best Dragon Ball Games for creating the custom character fans have always dreamed about.

Updated November 10, 2024, by Mark Ward: While games like Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero have brought joy to millions of DBZ lovers across the world, there’s something to be said about a game with a great character customization system. It’s a way for fans to imbue an all-time favorite universe with a little bit of themselves, and this is an invaluable joy that comes in many sizes. Luckily, game developers have figured this out too, giving players a number of games that allow customization options in everything from hairstyles and clothing, to varying eye shapes and even power sets.

7 Super Dragon Ball Heroes: World Mission

Deep Card Customization

As a Nintendo Switch port of a 14-year-old arcade game, most players shouldn’t expect a huge amount of opportunities for customization. But they do exist in Super Dragon Ball Heroes: World Mission, and fans can spend tons of time in the game’s card creator.

In it, they get to add images of their favorite characters from the show, resizing and naming the card, before deciding what the card will do in battle. At first glance, this may seem a little reductive, especially in comparison to other fully-fledged DBZ character creators. But once players get into the nitty-gritty, they’ll realize the true power in their hands.

6 Dragon Ball Legends

Players Can Choose How To Develop Shallot

Legends contains an extensive original story made specifically for this mobile game, taking place after the Tournament of Power in Dragon Ball Super. Here, King Kai pits warriors from across time against each other to see who comes out on top.

The game does not allow players to build a character from the ground up. However, the main character is a Saiyan who is original to the game, named Shallot. As such, players get to customize his moves and cosmetics to their liking. This game’s customization is for the player that likes choice, but doesn’t want to fall too deep into a roleplaying rabbit hole.

5 Dragon Ball: The Breakers

Tons Of Customization Options Help Make The Game Bearable

For a game that was released in 2022, The Breakers looks kind of like a PS3 game, something that’s seen in everything from the flat environments to the basic models of fan favorite characters. Worst of all, the created characters wind up being the most generic looking offenders.

On the flip-side, there are a ton of options to individualize their looks, from a full-range skin color palettes to a ton of hairstyles and eye types. It’s the kind of bright side that doesn’t really excuse the game’s faults, but goes a long way in making the experience tolerable enough to give it a try.

4 Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Tenkaichi

Customization Is Somehow Deep And Shallow At The Same Time

• Platform(s): Playstation 3, Xbox 360
• Released: 2011-10-25
• Developer(s): Spike
• Genre(s): Fighting

In addition to the main story that follows the events of the anime, Ultimate Tenkaichi features Hero Mode, delivered part and parcel with its own character creator. This is a separate and original story wherein players can create their own saiyan and battle iconic characters from the series.

Unfortunately, Hero Mode isn’t exactly all it’s cracked up to be, with disappointment starting right off the bat as players can only create male saiyans, and can only choose from a meager number of appearance options. There are, however, detailed color options for each piece of clothing, as well as some costume unlockables that players can chase as they progress through the story.

3 Dragon Ball Online

Did A Lot With its Character Customization During Its Short Life

• Platform(s): PC
• Released: 2010-2-4
• Developer(s): Shueisha, Bandai Namco Holdings
• Genre(s): MMO

This short-lived MMO’s premise was established as being within the manga’s continuity, but set in a sans-Goku future. In the year 1000, just about everybody wants to become a protector of the Earth, giving ample reason for players to be able to create their own player-character.

DBO launched with a mere three races to choose from, each having only two subclasses and a pretty short list of presets for their appearances. Part of the reason for such slim pickings was in keeping with the lore of the manga (Namekians have no gender and can’t change skin color, for instance), so one can only imagine how much more the devs could have added if the game had gained more popularity and lasted even a few more years.

2 Dragon Ball Fusions

Variety In Character Creation, As Well As Fusions Between Established Characters

In this original story, which once again plays with varying timelines and universes, alliances are complicated, to say the least. The story brings just about everyone from around the Dragon Ball universe together, past, present, and even GT, to duke it out.

For a 3DS game, Fusions offers a lot of customizable aspects in its character creator. A lot of the available details belong to other well-established characters in the series, but they’re still a ton of fun to play around with. Plus, the lack of true variety can be forgiven in a game like this that is all about mixing and matching every Dragon Ball character under the sun to create some truly wild combos.

1 Dragon Ball Xenoverse Series

The Most Fleshed-Out Character Creator In A DBZ Game

In the Xenoverseseries, players create a character that is brought to life by the mighty Shenron, according to the wishes of Trunks, in order to help preserve the Dragon Ball timeline. This allows for some fun, timey-wimey shenanigans, as every familiar threat in the series is put down once again.

Xenoverse 1 and 2 were released a little over a year apart, so much of the character creator remains the same in the sequel. That’s not really a bad thing, because on top of being able to choose from the five major warrior races in the series, including saiyans, players can customize just about everything about them, from pupil size to jaw shape.