First Impressions: Dragon Ball FighterZ · 10:15pm Jan 31st, 2018
I bought FighterZ yesterday, further tanking my Switch fund.
Ah well. It only means I wait a little longer.
Here are my first impressions after about an hour and change of gameplay, PS4 version.
I love the animation, the visual style, and the voice work. I'm iffy on the music--it's less Dragonball and more King of Fighters.
I like the whole Lobby concept and I like the Chapter Maps concept for Story Mode.
The fighting controls are simple but it'll take a while to learn all the special moves and combos for every character--but that's a common fighting game thing. It just means I need to relearn how to play a normal fighting game. And that's what this is--it's a normal 2.5D fighting game, like Street Fighter, MvC, KoF, and so forth.
The biggest plus here is that the game breaks from overused traditions in Dragonball games and has its own completely original story that doesn't involve rehashing the events of the DBZ anime from beginning to end, which too many DBZ games have done and only Xenoverse has done in a way that doesn't get tiresome. The story here revolves around "mysterious waves" appearing on Earth, paralyzing the Z-fighters and anyone else with significant fighting power. Only normal humans and gods are unaffected. Worse, there are clones of the Z-fighters and past enemies running wild all over the place causing mass destruction. And of course, we all know by now that everything happening at the moment is being caused by the new bitch in town, Android 21.
Timeline-wise, the game seems to be set somewhere just before the Tournament of Power, as the setting is clearly Super (Beerus and Whis show up in the prologue and Kuririn complains that he'll get fired from his police job if his clone is mistaken for him) but after Goku begins recruiting for the Tournament (Kuririn is bald). So...basically the game is a DB Super movie you can play.
The story also has a very...novel way of setting up the "only one fighter at a time" gameplay flow and involving the player as a direct party to the events rather than "you play as this guy". I'm not entirely sure it's strictly necessary? But it's...interesting.
My one complaint, and this is a big one that applies to a depressingly large number of PS4 games:
ALL story scenes are blocked from video recording and screen capture. You can record actual gameplay, but not story scenes. ANY story scenes. They're ALL blocked. I hate it when developers do this. P5 was worse, yes, but it's a nasty thing to do to gamers who want to share their experience. The only possible logic behind it is to avoid any kind of "FighterZ the Movie" uploads showing up on Youtube...which is, frankly, stupid.
Beyond that one complaint and the music being kind of meh, I'm enjoying it so far.
I'm enjoying the game as well and so far I'm on the villain's arc
I'm enjoying playing as Frieza the most XD
Yeah, I hate the story-scene blocks. I'd wanted to do an LP of DOA 5, only to find out that despite the fact that the game has been out for YEARS, Story Mode is still recording blocked.
At least it isn't as obnoxiously done as the MLB games. MLB '17 had LOADING SCREENS blocked! LOADING SCREENS! For a game that has to load every 5 minutes!
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Holy frijoles.
Meanwhile the Xbox One makes it stupidly easy to livestream your games.
It's not to Twitch or to YouTube, but it's something.
(And all the people who were going to upload all the cutscenes to YouTube already had a capture card to do so anyway, so blocking video recordings solves nothing.)
I hope you enjoy the game and give a full review when your done. From what I hear the cutscenes of characters interacting and roasting each other is a big highlight of the game.
Yamcha is in the game and he's a viable character. I'm happy with this
I'm probably not going to buy this, no into fighting games, but some of the lines in this, hoo, Cell and Frieza have some VICIOUS lines. We're talking Spopovich vs Videl levels of viciousness. Also, Bulma proves why Vegeta likes her. She has brass balls and nerves of STEEL. And it's amazing.
My main team is Frieza, Krillin (Kuririn), & Cell. Although I like playing as literally anyone, which is not something traditional 2d fighters often do. Granted, ArcSys helped with this game & they are amazing at making every character fun.
I've finished the Super Warrior's Arc and am looking forward to the Villain's Arc.
Currently grinding to get all the character interactions I've missed before moving on which means getting Goku and Vegeta up to level 40 to unlock SSJB for story mode. All in all I'm having a raging blast playing this, despite getting my butt handed to me on Hard Mode Arcade.
So, MythrilMoth, what would you say the odds are of this game influencing your Xenoverse fic? (In terms of it giving you ideas.)
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Eh, probably not much? I mean, I'm already pretty comfortable with what I've got planned out.
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That was probably during the beta. Trust me, the story scenes are blocked. You ALWAYS know when you're in a blocked scene on PS4.
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Dunno what to tell you, man. Entering a "blocked scene" on PS4 completely disables the Share button until you exit it.