By Taylor Johansen, Staff Writer
Dragon Ball Z has been the main influencer in action anime for decades, ever since its inception, and has remained incredibly popular for decades. So in June of 2017, when it was announced that a 2.5D fighting game called Dragon Ball Fighter Z would be releasing in early 2018 and was being produced by anime fighting game developer giant Arc System Works, people were incredibly excited. And when it released on Jan. 26, 2018, did it live up to the hype?
DBZ has had plenty of fighting games under its belt by now, as it’s an anime that’s all about incredibly powerful martial artists, aliens, and androids battling it out, which easily lends itself to a game about fighting. But they were almost always 3D fighters that were not too complex in nature and meant for casual audiences.
Fighter Z represents the first time since the Super Nintendo era that there’s been a 2D fighter on a home console for the DBZ franchise. Taking cues from the likes of the Marvel vs. Capcom series and the Guilty Gear series, DBFZ is a 3v3 tag-based fighting game, complete with the fast-paced, high-combo centric combat that defines the tag battle genre with a definite anime twist coming from the signature art style of Akira Toriyama and the graphics of Guilty Gear, the game DBFZ takes its engine from.
The game is very tightly designed, with interesting and varied mechanics that lend every fight variety. It rewards exploration of different combinations of assist attacks, team compositions, and combos. The roster, while at a relatively limited size of 24 characters (limited for a tag fighter at least), has an additional eight characters coming via DLC and is full of popular series stalwarts, all with unique and varied movesets full of references to the series they’re pulled from, with some animations lining up with pictures from the manga or anime perfectly.
There’s a great amount of love and care put into the game to make it a love letter to the franchise, and the game is chock full of easter eggs, wherein you can have scenes from the show play out if certain combinations of characters and arenas are made at the close of a fight. The extra work involved in these little details and moments really add to the experience. Other than that, the fighting systems are tight and polished, and the aesthetics are crisp and beautiful.
All in all, Dragon Ball Fighter Z is a great Dragon Ball game and a great fighting game, and looks like it has a big future in the fighting game community, filling the tag-fighter void left by the disappointing aftertaste of Marvel vs. Capcom’s last installment, Infinite. I rate Dragon Ball Fighter Z a four and a half out of five stars.