How good is Dragon Ball FighterZ?

[Magic_Hat]

So I'm a causal fan of both Dragon Ball (Z) and fighting games. However I have heard great things about it. I guess I'm looking for recommendations and what the game is like - strengths and flaws. I'm not buying it at full price (that is $60). However that's more a statement about me and how I rarely buy games at full price. I've only ever seen it drop to $29.99 on sale on steam. If it ever drops to $15 or even $20 I'd probably just buy, but I'm just wondering if it's worth it for 30 bucks.

So...thoughts on the game...

[Rynjin]

Pretty good. Not usually a fan of 2D fighters but it entertains me.

The only thing I hate about it is Supers interrupt normal attacks, it seems so backwards to me that Supers are the punish moves.

[Lord Raziere]

Well it has the usual fighting game "competitive scene" where you have to get good at it to win and the good players will totally wreck you up, but its fun to play, even if your casual, they nailed the gameplay. like, all the movements are fluid and fast paced, and it has that Arc Sys design to it. so I guess it depends on whether you've played an ArcSys game before and whether you like games made by them. Personally I liked it, I never got real good in online pvp, but I can feel like a badass beating up the computer.

there is a story mode. its kind of good. mostly for the character interactions involved. the only original character is Android 21. I guess how you feel about her will be how much you feel about villain fan service. vs. backstory. Because most people either think of her as troubled, tragic sympathetic character with a good backstory or just fan service incarnate. its almost always one or the other. neither of them are wrong though.

the characters you can choose of course have various fighting styles. Goku and Vegeta are the beginner-friendly characters as you might suspect, and there is a tier list, yes.

there is a lobby, you get to select your lobby avatar from chibi dragonball characters, its a thing.

the graphics and looks are good enough that you can just stare at it and admire it while the action happens, its great to watch even if you don't play it yourself.

but the gameplay? as I said, they nailed it. and thats what matters most to a fighting game.

[Zevox]

I'm perhaps rather biased, being as it's done by and very much reflective of the style of my favorite fighting game developer, Arc System Works, but I'd say it's extremely good.

Visually, the game is outstanding. It uses a style of cel-shaded art that the company came up with for the Guilty Gear franchise, that would look 2D while you're playing but is actually 3D, and fits a cartoon/anime art style extremely well, which enables them to show do great things with it as far as cinematic super moves, entrances and finishes, and the story mode go. And almost every move that each character has is genuinely taken straight from either the anime or the manga, from basic normals up through the supers. There's even special intros/finishes for some major battles from the show: start a match with SS Goku in the first spot on one team, Freeza in the first spot on the other, Krillin not on either team, and the stage being Planet Namek, and instead of the normal intros you'll see a scene recreating the first time that Goku went Super Saiyan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8-wFZndy1k) after Freeza killed Krillin. So in short, the presentation is incredible - it looks exactly like you'd want a DBZ fighting game to look.

Gameplay-wise, as is usual for ArcSys, the combat is focused on aggressive play - there's only one character in the whole cast who seems sort of tooled for zoning/keepaway, Freeza, and even then he's not that great at it and is more impressive for the combos he gets in Golden Freeza mode. Combos are based on a chain combo system for normals and easy cancels into specials and supers. The game has a number of unique mechanics to help it invoke the feel of DBZ: the super dash, where a character flies through the air and homes in on the opponent wherever they may be, which is a good way to quickly try to hit an opponent from almost anywhere and beats out basic ki blasts, but will lose to the universal anti-air move (down + heavy attack), most special move projectiles, or even just properly timed normals; the vanish attack, which costs a bar of super meter to teleport you directly behind the opponent and quickly hit them with a basic attack, causing a wallbounce if used in a combo, knocking them away on hit if not, or leaving you at advantage on block; the dragon rush, which acts as the game's throw mechanic, where your character does a flurry of strikes at an opponent, launches them away, and then automatically chases with a super dash to do a short air combo after; and of course a ki charge mechanic that you probably won't use much because it leaves you open to attack in a fast-paced game. There are auto-combos in the game done by just mashing the light or medium attack buttons for beginners, and parts of them are useful even at higher levels of play, but they do far less damage than proper, full combos. Combo structure overall can be rather same-y for much of the cast, sort of like in Marvel vs Capcom 3, but various characters will have different ways to alter or extend the basic combo depending on their unique properties.

A common criticism of the gameplay at high levels is that it has too few defensive tools, leading to good players being able to keep their opponent locked down blocking for extremely long periods of time compared to other fighting games, which is definitely true. Only a small handful of characters (SS Vegeta, both versions of Gohan, and Cooler) have a meterless reversal, only level 3 supers have true startup invincibility on them (and they're of course very punishable on block), and the deflect mechanic that is the only unique defensive tool in the game won't reliably end a lot of pressure situations. Between assists, vanish, and some character-specific ways to keep blockstrings going, being on the defensive in DBFZ can be a very frustrating experience, as you'll need to block a lot of mixups before a skilled opponent's "turn" so to speak actually comes to an end.

Another common but somewhat less important criticism is that the game's damage is overall rather low, leading to the matches taking longer than in other fighting games. Which can be very much so true - it's probably most common to kill an enemy character in three combos in this game, and since it's a team game with three characters on each team, that means an average of nine combos to win. And that's before you factor in the rather quick healing of blue health that characters get when you switch them out or when you use the Sparking Blast mechanic (basically a powered up state similar to but weaker than Marvel vs Capcom 3's X-Factor). But touch-of-death combos are also a thing in this game - it simply requires spending a lot of resources, often 5-7 bars of super meter (you get only 7 of those max at one time), both of your assists, and the once-per-game Sparking Blast.

Still, overall if you like fast-paced, aggressive gameplay in fighting games, and are playing the game at a more casual level where you're less likely to run into someone holding you in blockstun for thirty seconds straight, you'll probably enjoy DBFZ's gameplay. It's like Marvel vs Capcom done by Arc System Works, and that's a pretty great thing IMO.

In terms of balance, the game of course has its top tier characters if you get really good at it - Cell and Bardock in particular can be oppressively good even after they were nerfed a couple of months ago, Adult Gohan and Kid Buu are also very strong, and SS Vegeta remains probably the most commonly used assist character in the game despite also getting nerfed a couple of months after the game released. But overall the balance is in pretty decent shape, with most of the roster falling into a sizable mid-tier range, and only a few characters (Beerus, SSB Vegeta, Hit) being considered truly bad, and even those can work to some extent at low to mid levels of play, they're just too inadequate for high level play.
As far as single-player gameplay goes, true to ArcSys' style there is a fairly large story mode, though personally I wouldn't say it's one of their better ones. There's a lot of filler fights in it, and to some extent it repeats the story three times (once from the heroes' perspective, once from the villains', once from the Androids'), though there is some difference to each. But it's an original-ish story that feels very much like a real Dragon Ball Z story arc - partially because the villain, Android 21, is essentially what you'd get if you combined Cell and Majin Buu. And it can be very humorous (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDZ_mUWfD6Q), which is always a fun touch with ArcSys' story modes.

Plus of course you've got an arcade mode, a versus mode for offline multiplayer or single matches against the CPU, and training mode. There's a challenge mode for learning some combos, but it's extremely low-level and basic, with few that are remotely difficult to do, and almost none resemble the combos that actual mid-level play uses, much less high-level play.

The online is relatively good. Matchmaking can take longer than in some other fighting games, and connections are of variable quality - sometimes it plays pretty smoothly, others not so much. It's not the best online I've seen in an ArcSys game (that probably goes to BlazBlue Cross Tag), but it's generally playable. I'm personally not a fan of how they have the lobby-ish system set up - mostly because when you jump into one of the "rings" that function as the lobbies you need to wait for the current match to end before you can begin even spectating, and as mentioned matches in DBFZ tend to last longer than in other fighting games, and most lobbies will be set up for best 2 of 3 matches, so you can be waiting a while with nothing to do. Just searching out ranked or casual matches works fine though, and you can turn on that search and go play other parts of the game - I mostly use training mode for that, but arcade, versus, and story mode work fine too..

One minor source of frustration is that unlocking extra character colors beyond the 6 each start with or extra lobby avatars is entirely random. You earn an in-game currency called zenny for doing basically anything and spend it on capsules that contain either those or a random title for your onlines player card, and there's a lot of them, which can make getting all the colors or avatars for your preferred character take a long time, if it happens at all. But it is also just a minor cosmetic thing, not a huge deal.

So yeah, overall, I think it's a great game that was well worth picking up at full price personally. I've also grabbed a couple of the DLC characters, specifically Vegito and base Vegeta - very much like Vegito, and base Vegeta's okay. The other DLC characters aren't to my tastes enough for me to pay extra for them, but they may be for you. Bardock's great competitively, base Vegeta and Android 17 look promising there too I hear (though they're newer and it's less agreed upon exactly how good they are), and the rest are generally mid-tier-ish but each pretty unique in one way or another.


The only thing I hate about it is Supers interrupt normal attacks, it seems so backwards to me that Supers are the punish moves.
:smallconfused: That confuses me, because that's extremely standard in fighting games. Heck, Dragon Ball FighterZ's supers are actually worse at that than most, because none of the level 1 supers get startup invincibility, only the level 3s. It's just that throwing supers around raw generally isn't the smartest thing to do compared to comboing into them because they're almost always very punishable on block and meter tends to be a pretty important resource, so spending it just to get punished is too great of a risk. Both of which are actually generally true in DBFZ too at high levels of play.

[Rynjin]

:smallconfused: That confuses me, because that's extremely standard in fighting games. Heck, Dragon Ball FighterZ's supers are actually worse at that than most, because none of the level 1 supers get startup invincibility, only the level 3s. It's just that throwing supers around raw generally isn't the smartest thing to do compared to comboing into them because they're almost always very punishable on block and meter tends to be a pretty important resource, so spending it just to get punished is too great of a risk. Both of which are actually generally true in DBFZ too at high levels of play.

Maybe in 2D fighters; like I said I'm not a big fan of (and therefore not very experienced with) them. My experience has always been the communities are unfriendly and hard to break into, so my forays into Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter (especially, I at least had fun couch games of MK) were extremely short lived. You can't effectively learn the game when you die in the first 10 seconds of a match and get taunted for it.

My main fighter experience is with the Soul Calibur franchise, where the only "super" is basically a finisher combo/"win more" attack. Not like DBFZ where, EX, Goku's level 3 is big damage that also acts as an escape.

[Zevox]

Maybe in 2D fighters; like I said I'm not a big fan of (and therefore not very experienced with) them.

My main fighter experience is with the Soul Calibur franchise, where the only "super" is basically a finisher combo/"win more" attack. Not like DBFZ where, EX, Goku's level 3 is big damage that also acts as an escape.
Perhaps, although the most recent two Soul Calibur games have had actual super moves. Most of them don't seem to have startup invincibility until after the super flash in SC6, granted, but they're so fast that I saw them used that way a fair amount in the beta anyway. Can't recall for sure whether they worked that way in 5, it's been a while, but I think they had startup invincibility there.

But yeah, completely standard in 2D fighting games for supers to beat anything but other supers. Throwing them around raw is just an extremely high-risk, high-reward thing to do, where the risk outweighs the reward to the point where high level players rarely if ever do it.

[Rynjin]

Perhaps, although the most recent two Soul Calibur games have had actual super moves. Most of them don't seem to have startup invincibility until after the super flash in SC6, granted, but they're so fast that I saw them used that way a fair amount in the beta anyway. Can't recall for sure whether they worked that way in 5, it's been a while, but I think they had startup invincibility there.

5 is a game I didn't play much; the changes made from 4 REALLY turned me off of the game, combined with the clear "We don't care, but give us your money" attitude the unfinished story mode conveyed. I think I played a grand total of 3 matches online in 5, and a few more with a friend before I decided I hated pretty much everything about it.

IIRC though they didn't have any special invincibility, but did add a bit of hyper armor to already beefy characters? I'm pretty sure you could cancel them with any jab in 5 at least, and all were dodgeable in their start-up and didn't go into "cutscene mode" until the attack was actually confirmed.

Anyway, the point here is: I suck at 2D fighters, have little experience with them, and am kind of biased against liking them due to earlier experience...and I still think DBFZ is a fun game to play with friends at least, which is my endorsement to the OP.