Dragon Ball FighterZ Review

Get ready to rumble as fan favorite Dragon Ball makes an explosive return to fighting games. Whether as iconic characters or brand new ones you'll be destroying planets and blowing up your opponents in spectacular fashion. This game does the series justice in visuals, audio, and gameplay. Not only are you receiving a bang for your buck, but a true Dragon Ball experience.

Dragon Ball FighterZ Review

Introduction

Dragon Ball FighterZ is critically acclaimed and widely loved anime Dragon Ball’s return to fighting games. Developed by the creators of Guilty Gear, BlazBlue, and Under Night, Arc System Works and published by Bandai Namco. Dragon Ball FighterZ is joining games like Street Fighter V as a 2.5D fighter, meaning everything is completely 3D, except your perspective. This game truly lives up to the Dragon Ball standard, the spectacle and visuals are simply amazing. The characters, animations, and settings look like they’re taken right out of the anime.

Other than the visuals of the game, it offers a ton of singleplayer and multiplayer options for hundreds of hours, like the story, arcade, tournament, and practice modes. Not to mention the multiplayer modes, like 3v3 matches. You put three players versus another team of three and you all duke it out, controlling your individual characters. Things like this weren’t asked for, and that’s what makes this game so great and surprising. It has so many amazing qualities that go far and above the standard in gaming.

Dragon Ball FighterZ is available on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Steam for $59.99

Story

The story for FighterZ is a brand new original story created by Arc System Works. To be frank, this is the weakest part of the game by far. The story itself isn’t the worst, and the character interactions are often funny. You (the player character) start this story of being woken up by Bulma, but you quickly realize you aren’t yourself but are inhabiting the body of Goku. You quickly realize that the world is in grave danger, and only you, inhabiting the bodies of powerful warriors can save it.

However, this part of the game is just far too long. You can spend an upwards of 10 hours fighting easy bots, and boss battles. You do not get the full roster of characters either, so you can’t use these bots to practice these bots whenever you want. The mixture of the easy to beat bots, and playing characters you might not like, with this weird level system, you quickly start to find the story mode to be more tedious than fun. It is especially tedious knowing you have no choice to do it, or you won’t unlock android 21. This may put off a great many newcomers as it may be the very first thing they do.

Audio and Visuals

The visuals and audio in this game were made with an amazing amount of love. If you are a fan of the anime you will not be disappointed, and even if you aren’t you’ll be stunned regardless. The detail put into every part of the game makes you want to keep playing just to see more. Visually I didn’t see any issues with the game, and the audio works well too throughout my playtime.

Visually this game goes far and beyond the standard in the fighting game community. Not to mention relatively easy to run on pc and consoles. This game follows other more recent fighting games in the 2.5D style. You have expertly crafted 3D character models on beautiful 3D backgrounds who interact with each other. On some stages you can destroy the entire stage to have it become a molten wasteland, on others you can knock your opponent into a different stage entirely. All with stunning visual spectacle. The spectacle of the game is where this all stands out. Most matches will find themselves ending with an eye-popping “destructive finish” and with the right conditions you can end with a “dramatic finish” as well. These are coming directly from the anime making direct references, like when Goku first becomes a Super Saiyan. These for many will be the first thing you see about the game and is what make it one of the best games to spectate.

Dragon Ball FighterZ Review
The audio for the game may be in the same league as the visuals. First, the music, the music in this game is composed by Arc System Works who is known for their fantastic work with Guilty Gear’s, and BlazBlue’s soundtracks. You have awesome themes for each individual character and overall themes for the entire game. Giving you quite the tracklist for the game. Each track does a fantastic job fitting the tone for a fight, as well as fitting the character themselves. Like Hit’s track, which is a nice jazzy track that fits his character’s demeanor but also keeps up-tempo for keeping the players in the mood of the fight.

Dragon Ball FighterZ Review
The other sounds in the game are simply amazing. A lot of them which seem to be taken directly from the anime. From the signature moves to the world ending attacks, everything sounds good. The only issue with sound in this game must be with some of the voice attacking. If you’re like me, you grew up with the English voice actors in the anime. However, the English voice-over in this game is quite weird, and it’s very noticeable. The Japanese is high quality and carries the rest, but those of you looking forward to the English voices may be disappointed.

Gameplay

Dragon Ball FighterZ is a 2.5D team fighter, centered around picking 3 characters for your team. You use all three characters in willing, using their assists for combos or defense, but also tagging them in and out for similar reasons. The game offers a multitude of game modes, that keep you engaged. I’ve already spoken about the story mode that can drag on for 10 hours, but there is also the arcade mode you can play for double that, as it increases in difficulty when you clear stages. The multiplayer modes are also plentiful offering player matches, ranked matches, private rooms, and public tournaments. All of these can keep you engrossed for hours on end, but multiplayer as it stands is having issues with players disconnecting and awful connections. Some players can’t get into games at all, even private ones. The problem has been happening for a bit of time now and has yet to be completely fixed, making the online experience as of now extremely lackluster.

Dragon Ball FighterZ Review
Dragon Ball FighterZ does an amazing job of keeping balance. All the characters are very unique, but keeping itself balanced, and fun. You never feel like one character or team is overpowered. All the mechanics are having a natural response to it, while also keeping itself accessible to new players. This game is very accessible for new players, I would even go as far to say one of the most accessible fighting game on the market. For people just starting out you have auto-combos that give you easy damage without learning long combo strings. For more experienced players there are still those extremely long and satisfying combos that make you feel amazing when you finish with a flashy explosion.

The mechanics of the game does reward the more experienced player, however, so new players may feel easily overwhelmed by a player who has been playing and practicing for much longer than them. There are mechanics designed for new players that seem to be too easily exploited by experienced ones, like the Dragon Balls. Overall the gameplay of this game is fantastic. It feels good and looks good.

Conclusion

Dragon Ball FighterZ is by far the biggest fighting of this year, and it is only the start. This game boasts gorgeous visuals and amazing sound design. The gameplay can keep you engrossed for hours on end with plenty of content, alone or with friends. This is by far to the best time to get into fighting games, starting with this one. The only part of this game holding it back is a lackluster story and wonky online, but with the servers promised to be fixed soon these things are small missteps in this great advanced in fighting games. With BlazBlue cross tag releasing soon, and 8 more DLC characters confirmed for this game, Arc System Works is looking to take control of the fighting game scene.

PROS CONS
+ Great Accessible Gameplay                                         – laggy online
+ Amazing Soundtrack                                           – weak tedious story
+ Amazing Visuals
+ Tons of Content
9.1
Amazing

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