Dragon Ball FighterZ

[The Boston Crab]

Having played and kind of enjoyed SNK Heroines, Blade Strangers and Blaz Blue Cross Tag Battle, I'm well up for this. It's supposed to be the best of the Arc Sys accessible fighting games, but with plenty more depth than the games mentioned. It's actually great so far though I haven't got a fucking clue what I'm doing. It's just anime vomit all over my telly but in a good way. I've lost every online match so far which is unusual for me with fighting games (not to be a prick) but I'm really enjoying learning something very different. It feels like a totally different thing to Street Fighter, for example.


Anyone played this elsewhere or planning to get it on Switch?

[Consignia]

Anyone played this elsewhere or planning to get it on Switch?

I've been waiting for the Switch version, since I've been lacking a beat 'em up to play on it. But it's come at time were loads of other games have come out, so it's gone to the bottom of the pile. So maybe, once it's discounted down to the price of a penny chew.

[The Boston Crab]

What about Blaz Blue for something much cheaper? It's similar and I probably find the characters more interesting and appealing. I don't know shit about DB but every little cunt seems to have the same face and hair.


Edit: There are four people on Earth, five including me, who are in a BlazBlue lobby right now on Friday night. Don't bother. No games available on Blade Strangers or SNK Heroines. Pretty grim. I'm hoping DBFZ is the one which takes off on Switch.

[The Boston Crab]

I put a couple of hours into this last night and it's really good. It does feel very fast-paced and kind of automated compared to Street Fighter but I'm happy to have something new to learn which breaks away from the Garou/KoF/SF kind of inputs and pacing. I decided to go for it over FIFA which looks too similar (to me) to last year's version and I doubt I'd get any more out of it than I would just playing 18. This is something different to me.

It does look sensational in handheld, too, and because the special moves are so simple to input, the Joycon sticks are no real hindrance.

[madhair60]

I like fighting game but this one just looks like complete dog shit - just flashing, yelling and madness. Friend of mine loves it and he's a CUNT so I'm really not sure here. Tell you what though, here's a dragon ball banger:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFl6ydm7O-w

[The Boston Crab]

Give it a chance buddy, it's like a live action cartoon with its own flow and rhythms. The best fighting game on the Switch besides ARMS.

[The Boston Crab]

To give a better taste of what it actually is, because I know it looks completely overwhelming, I'll explain a bit about how to play and the basic controls and why it's so great.

Overall, it's very much about movement, controlling space and making quick decisions and reading your opponent rather than being able to input mad twiddles of the stick and one frame inputs and stuff.

To keep things pacy, you have a dash button which basically homes in on the opponent to close the distance. This seems OP until you realise you can usually punish hard if you block it, or predict it, which is easy enough. You can also double jump and air dash and stuff with regular stick controls. This makes for a much faster, more fluid game than Street Fighter or Tekken or anything else I've played, to be honest. I guess that's the Arc System Works style but this is the best it's ever been to my tastes.

Offensively, you have light, medium and heavy auto combos, meaning you can button bash, but you can also do manual combos which differ for each character by pressing different combinations of attacks. These tend to be more powerful if you can pull them off but obviously they're easier to mess up or miss.

You also have your usual special moves, almost all of which are quarter circle and press a button. Nothing complicated from that point of view, at all. It's knowing how and when to use them for best effect which is important. You also have super and ultra moves which are just as easy to input and which use up your meter. They tend to be appropriate risk, appropriate reward kind of things. All of this so far makes for a very accessible and fast paced mashy flashy game. Great.

Beyond that, it's a 3v3 fighter which means tagging partners in and out, calling on them for assist special moves and all manner of shenanigans which I haven't even scratched the surface of. Different characters have different synergy for assists and so on. That's complicated in theory but again, very easy to use in practice. I'm sure I'm not getting the most of that system yet, though. You can also tag out your fighter to let them recover some health (if you know what I mean about two health bars in fighting games, it's that, but it's not important to go into detail here). This means that there's an extra emphasis on using special moves to finish off your opponent, not just knock down their health, because they'll tag out and you've basically wasted your efforts and meter. That makes for a fantastic extra dynamic to consider. Assists are on a cooldown and the best people I've played have been rinsing these in every round, while I always forget about them/have no clue how to best use them.

Beyond that, you literally have a move which teleports you immediately behind the other player for the cost of some meter. That's really useful, but also I've started to read and punish it and vice versa, but it's an interesting extra element to keep you in the thick of the action and also to get out of the corner! What else...Oh, you can just stand still and charge up your meter super fast but obviously you leave yourself wide open but it's a thing to do if you knock down perhaps. You can also activate your spark once per fight which makes you more powerful and refills your health bar. Also, if you get the seven dragon balls which pop for various reasons during a fight, you can summon Shenron, some massive dragon, which can bring your dead matey back to life, fill up your health, give you massive power and something else, can't remember. It hardly ever happens but when it does you're like fuckin hell yes.

The presentation and stuff is insane. If someone shoots a fireball at you and you reflect it, it will fly off into the background and cause permanent damage to the scenery. If you finish an opponent with a heavy attack, you will send them flying off to destroy some more scenery. If you finish them with an ultra, it'll be insanely flashy and so on but then also it'll zoom out to show the impact of the attack from miles away or from space. It's pure delirious excess.

One of the best games I've played this year, in fact, and much much more fun than SFV.

[The Boston Crab]

I've made a pact not to be a nob on here because it's boring for everyone and wearing but I mean it when I say I hope none of youse fuckin wake up

[madhair60]

Just gave it a go. I like how easy to play it is, no immediate barrier to entry. Not sure why the fucking menu is a cunty little map you have to run around.

[The Boston Crab]

I thought that too but you can press ZL to access an actual menu, not sure if you saw that. I didn't for the first hour or so. I quite like farting around in there to be honest because it's usually pretty full at the moment. BlazBlue's lobby was depressing as fuck in comparison.

[The Boston Crab]

Had some frigging barnstorming matches on this. It's so good to play something which is constant mad action and gambles and stuff versus SFV's repetitive baiting and familiar setups. This may well become very familiar but playing with three chars per round keeps things so fresh. If you think anime is a shitter and fighting games are for wankers like me, these are both true statements but this is the best fighting game of this generation and it's the most accessible deep fighter ever, or the deepest accessible fighter ever, depending on your experience and skill. There are also loads of modes so you feel encouraged to just play for fun where SFV rams ranked down your throat and every loss is really painful and people just play for victory at any cost, or rage quit. I've not had one DC in fifty fights on DBFZ! That's mad. I'd say one in three DC on SFV when I'm going to win.

[The Boston Crab]

This game has been cancelled, effectively.

Toei, who hold the rights to Dragonball, have said no streaming allowed at EVO Japan and others.  EVO US is likely to follow suit. This effectively kills DBFZ as a competitive enterprise. No community, no game. Watch the playerbase deflate like a poorly tied balloon.

I can't explain quite how senseless this is. It was the most watched game at EVO last year. The biggest thing to happen in fighting games for years. Most registrations and participants, I believe. Biggest, youngest community. Accessible but incredibly deep so appeals to all levels of entry. The one thing to genuinely challenge the SF hegemony. CANNED. All because some old Japanese suits don't understand the value of this eSport shit and feel like they're missing out on a few yen which they would no doubt spend on foetus dumplings and achildren's hearts.

[Delete Delete Delete]

Its absolute madness. Just leaving big bucks on the table through exposure, because they want to nickle and dime tournaments.