Dragon Ball FighterZ Review

They have had to spend many years, but as it was seen, with the arrival of Dragon Ball FighterZ we finally have a game that not only takes care of being at the height of what this legendary series deserves to please the fans of Goku and company, but also is positioned as one of the best fighting titles of recent times and as one of the great releases of this 2018 that has just started.

It was necessary to start this text like this, since, generally, games based on licenses (especially if they are anime or manga) are usually considered as minor products that only seek to take advantage of the pull of the series on which they are based or content only to it's fan base, a very different case to that presented by Arc System Works (Guilty Gear, BlazBlue) with it's new creation, a study that has already demonstrated it's ambition and mastery in the genre countless times.

Duration

Completing the story for the first time will take you about 15 hours, which can get really boring and tedious due to the lack of challenge, although luckily the plot will encourage you to continue. The good news is that when you finish it, you will unlock the Hard Mode, where things become much more interesting, since most of the characters will reach him with a low level and the AI becomes much more aggressive, forcing you to change the members of your group and to choose your objects equipped with care to be able to progress with guarantees.

Gameplay

The first thing I have to say, is that you are facing a 2D fight game by teams of three against three in the purest Marvel vs Capcom 3 style, so you will enjoy some very fast, frenetic and very spectacular battles, where the use of great techniques and specials is the order of the day.

Something that surprises a lot in a first contact is how accessible it is in terms of controls, with some really simple commands for the techniques (everything is quarter moon plus one or two buttons) and a large number of combos that are made automatically Simply pressing one button after another and without having to worry about much more.

Thanks to this, anyone can take the game and start enjoying their proposal, so if you are a Dragon Ball fan but not of this genre, you can also enjoy their combats and emulate the battles of the series from the start.

However, the title hides multiple layers of depth and soon after you start to investigate in the Training Mode, you will begin to discover that you can create a multitude of combos that come out of the initial automatism with which the game receives you, giving free rein to your imagination and creativity to find the way to link and extend the chains of blows in very original and imaginative ways.

In addition, regardless of the combos that you can get to perform, has many different mechanics that you have to learn to master if you want to become one of the best and that make the difference between one player and another, especially if you consider that the fights take place at such a speed that you will have to have the reflections very sharp and be very awake to know what to do in each moment.

You can perform quick chases to fly in an instant to the opponent's position and punish him with a combo, defend yourself, parry, teleport to the enemy's back and hit him hard both to dodge and to lengthen a combo, to invoke the characters you have in the reserve so that they execute an attack and disappear, manually reload the Ki, force your enemy to change their active character, use sparking (you can only do it once per combat and it's effects are greater the fewer alive characters you have) empower you enormously temporarily and activate the regeneration of life even if you are not on the bench, and so on.

As i said before, the fact that it's a game of three against three is not merely circumstantial, since you can see that it's entire playable structure revolves around this. For example, the characters that are in the reserve will regenerate the blue portion of their life bar, so changing your active character frequently to receive little damage is very important, if you don't want to be killed before you have blinking time.

In general, fighting in Dragon Ball FighterZ is a hilarious experience that is enjoyed by all audiences, regardless of their level of experience with the genre, something that speaks very well of what Arc System Works has achieved at a playable level. This also helps the constant spectacle that you see on the screen and the frenetism with which everything happens, perfectly emulating and capturing the essence of the series and transmitting the sensation of really seeing one of the mythical anime fights.

One of the aspects that most often draw the attention of Dragon Ball games, is usually the amount of playable characters. It is such a long series and with so many charismatic fighters that, as fans, you always want to have the maximum possible to choose from your favorites and be able to recreate any battle that occurs to you. Which is why I have come to like the different deliveries of the Budokai Tenkaichi saga, where the number of playable fighters has reached more than one hundred.

But this isn't the focus of Dragon Ball FighterZ, rather the opposite. Here you have sought to create a pure and balanced fighting game, where each of it's characters is perfectly differentiated and offers details and unique combat styles, so you only have 24 warriors in your list, that will be expanded with eight more thanks to the season pass.

Graphics & Design

At the graphic level there is not much to say, since the screenshots and videos of the game speak for themselves, offering a show that few games can aspire to match. The modeling of the characters is very good, looking exactly like the manga and surpassing even seen in the anime itself, the recreation of special techniques and the amount of effects they put on the screen is a real joy and the animations are pretty good, emulating with great success each one of the blows and poses that you have seen in the vignettes and capturing as never before the essence of the series.

Finally, you have a very caustic soundtrack that sets up every fight very well, although the quality of their songs has seemed somewhat irregular, mixing very catchy compositions with others full of somewhat generic guitars. The effects are extracted directly from the anime, so they are quality and completely recognizable by the fan.

Conclusion

In the absence of being able to thoroughly test their online, Dragon Ball FighterZ is that game that fans like me have been dreaming for so many years. A title that is not content to be extremely faithful to the license and please the fans, but seeks to go further and become one of the new references of it's kind, thanks to a hilarious, frenetic, balanced, very polished gameplay and with multiple layers of depth, so that it can be enjoyed by all types of players. A tribute to both Dragon Ball and the fighting games, that has since become one of the first essentials of this promising 2018. Thank you Shenron for granting us, our long-awaited wish!

*Game was provided by Bandai Namco for this review