How was our first taste of the upcoming title?
This past weekend held the closed beta for Dragon Ball FighterZ, the highly anticipated 2D fighting game from developer Arc System Work. I was lucky enough to snag a code for the beta, so here’s what I thought of the event.
The beta ran for three-hour periods over four sessions throughout Saturday and Sunday. Once the beta was downloaded and your region is specified, the player enters a lobby with other players from that region. The player becomes a cute chibi-version of Goku, and is explained that you can enter a fight or spectate a fight through the main arena of the lobby. Also, you can change your chibi player avatar into another character featured in the beta (I went with my boy Krillin).
I wasn’t expecting the beta to feature a player lobby, rather just a character select screen and a matchmaking service to get you into the fight. However, the lobby gives you a better sense of what the actual game will offer, as you can see closed pathways to other modes (one that looks like the World Tournament Stadium and the Kame House), perhaps indicating where the player would head for the tournament or story mode of the game.
Anyway, once you talk to one of the arena attendants, you are put in the queue and wait for your fight.
Before that though, you need to boot up the customization screen and select the characters you want to fight as. There are pre-selected character loadouts, but you can also specify what three character team you want.
With that taken care of, and after waiting a while to be placed into a match, the fighting began.
Instantly, I was struck by how gorgeous this game is. This is easily the best looking Dragon Ball game, with the stages and characters looking like they were plucked straight out of the anime. Character designs are beaming with bright colors and bold, fluid lines. Each character animates with distinct movement and purpose. Vegeta has a confident strut, Gohan has a stern, serious energy, and big characters like Cell and Android 16 have this lumbering presence that entertained me by just lightly pressing the analog stick forward to see them walk.
However there’s absolutely no time to admire the smaller animation details, as these fights are fast and brutal. As soon as the match starts, you need to be focused and prepared, or your opponent will mercilessly defeat you in seconds.
Dragon Ball FighterZ uses a four button attack system: light, medium, heavy, and special. Think Marvel vs. Capcom. By mashing your light or medium attack, you can perform a simple combo (something I did A LOT), but this is not going to get you far. To succeed in FighterZ, you need to leverage this attack system with the more complicated techniques, special attacks, and character changing.
Specifically, the opponents I fought who bashed my head in the ground the fastest were able to start-up a combo, counter one of my moves, start-up a new combo, change characters or use an assist move, then finish me off with a special attack or super special attack.
The more complicated techniques I alluded to earlier include teleporting away from an incoming attack, super dashing into an opponent to initiate a combo, or use the character changing or assist buttons to keep a combo moving and juggle the opponent for maximum damage.
If this sounds complicated, it’s because it is. This ain’t Dragon Ball Z: Budokai; this is a full-fledged competitive fighting game. Getting the most out of your team of three characters requires memory, technique, and lots of skill. If you jump into a match without these things in mind, you’re going to get your butt kicked, and dear lord, did I ever.
Most of my battles were over in what seemed like an instant. So many of the opponents I faced had an excellent understanding of the game’s mechanics, and were the right audience for the closed beta. I on the other hand was struggling to keep up.
With all this in mind, I was upset that the beta did very little to introduce players to the mechanics of the game. There is no practice mode for the player to develop the needed skills to keep up in a match, and worse, there wasn’t a basic introduction or tutorial. I was really expecting King Kai or someone to begin the beta by showing the player basic controls and super moves. Instead, I had to constantly consult the below image and other out-of-beta resources to figure those features out.
However, it’s completely understandable why that wasn’t here. This was a beta. It’s meant to be a showcase for what the completed game will feel like, and to be fine-tuned before the actual release. I expect the retail release of FighterZ to include the practice mode I desire, and I’ll probably be spending a lot of time there.
With complaining out-of-the-way, I was able to get better with each match I played; experimenting and getting a feel of each of the 11 available characters. My favorite combination of characters eventually became Android 18, Krilln, and Android 16.
18 offers a nice balance of mobility and strength, and her super moves with Android 17 were fun to pull off, when I was able to do them. Krillin is amusingly technical, and 16 is a slow, close combat fighter. A lot of his special attacks require you to grapple the opponent and throw them to the ground. When they’re far away, his special Rocket Punch projectile is incredibly satisfying to bombard your opponent with.
Besides the versus and spectating mode, the beta didn’t offer any other content. While an introduction to the mechanics of the game would have been appreciated, the beta did succeed in convincing me one thing: Dragon Ball FighterZ is fun. Even after getting pummeled match after match, I still wanted to dive back in, enticed by the gorgeous graphics and smooth gameplay. If the game is indeed fleshed out with a variety of modes to keep things fresh, FighterZ could easily be the best and most engaging Dragon Ball game we’ve ever had.
Dragon Ball FighterZ releases February 2018 for PS4, Xbox One, and PC.
