Original message (2624 Views )
| |  "Dragon Ball FighterZ" , posted Tue 30 Jan 03:01  
I was surprised to find that there was no dedicated thread for DBFZ. I guess we're all too busy actually playing it than talking about it :D
I don't have any insight into the gameplay, but I will say that so far it feels like a real great balance of accessibility and depth.
Visually the game is astounding. These characters are notoriously difficult to pull off in 3d. Toriyama's style is incredibly ideosyncratic, and on top of that, they're such popular, iconic characters that if anything was off the fans would immediately sense it. But this game is pretty perfect!
I love that, much like GGXrd, although it's full 3d, everything is treated with the care of traditional animation. There are no tweens in this game. Every single frame you see is one that was posed by hand. I'm certain it's all key frames, no tweens. On top of that, everything is displayed from a fixed perspective. Every movement comes out at the same angle. I love this, not because of it's fetishistic adherence to 2d gaming conventions, but because it makes the game read better. You're always seeing every attack from the optimal angle that it was designed for. The contours always read perfectly. It doesn't feel limited, in fact, it's a layer of abstraction that in my opinion makes the game look and read better. It makes me wonder how much better Street Fighter V might look with a forced, fixed perspective instead of a 3d camera. OK that's enough shade thrown at SFV.
Anyway, DBFZ looks and plays great. I'm so over the moon about it. This is pretty much the DBZ game I've always dreamed of as a kid. I'm talking about countless hours sitting in the back seat on long road trips, staring out into space, fantasizing about how my perfect DBZ game would look and play. This is it. This is the game we've all been waiting for, ever since Capcom started making their own DBZ style games that just happened to have Marvel characters in em!
Oh one more thing, I'm really enjoying the story mode! They put way more effort into it than they had to. It's simple but charming and does a good job of making sure you get a chance to learn all the basic mechanics.
Anyway that's enough from me, I look forward to hearing from the other folks on this board who actually understand a thing or two about the actual mechanics in this game.
www.art-eater.com
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| | "Re(1):Dragon Ball FighterZ" , posted Tue 30 Jan 06:54
I'm... honestly... not a fan of it?
I may warm to it later on, but in term of mechanics, it feels really... I don't know, unidimensional. I hope future DLC characters will add more unique mechanics, but far too many characters feel similar, and those who stand out the most (Ginyu, the final boss) don't really feel like they work so well...? I mean, they're fun, but don't seem as useful as simply taking 3 standard characters and stomp over stuff. The limitations to take advantage of them seem far too finicky.
Also, future DLC character seem trash, according to the datamining. The main problem of the game is that too many characters look and feel the same, and adding 2,5 more Gokus and 1,5 Vegetas is not going to help.
Though 18 looks nice, difficult to use yet overwhelming when played well and supported adequately.
Finally, something that will only be resolved in the long term is the legibility issue. Many people think Mahvel is unreadable, but MvC3 and Infinite are actually pretty clear in term of what's-happening-on-screen once you get the hang of it. Whether DBF will be or not remains to be seen (tehe), but I'm worried that some of the best assists in my limited experience seem to be those that obscure a big bunch of the screen with the explosion/smoke.
The movements options are a step up from both Mahvel and GGXrd I feel, but still below the golden standard of the genre, AH3.
...
..... Also, I never liked DBZ, I was more of a Saint Seiya person. Alberto, who's a Toriyama fan but doesn't play fighting games, asked whether we could refund the game after 3 hours. So I don't think either of us are really in the target, regardless of the qualities of the visuals or the size of the package.
On the bright side, I really, really hope DBF will be the wake-up jab the person in charge of budgeting the Capcom fighting game division needs.
quote:
It makes me wonder how much better Street Fighter V might look with a forced, fixed perspective instead of a 3d camera.
Can you explain that bit? What's the difference between the cameras of these games / any 2D fighting game with 3D objects? They all seem similar to me...
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| | "Re(2):Dragon Ball FighterZ" , posted Tue 30 Jan 08:34:
quote:
I'm... honestly... not a fan of it?
I may warm to it later on, but in term of mechanics, it feels really... I don't know, unidimensional. I hope future DLC characters will add more unique mechanics, but far too many characters feel similar, and those who stand out the most (Ginyu, the final boss) don't really feel like they work so well...? I mean, they're fun, but don't seem as useful as simply taking 3 standard characters and stomp over stuff. The limitations to take advantage of them seem far too finicky.
After a bit of play, FighterZ feels shallow.
It doesn't feel like there are many moves, and the moves that do exist functionally seem a bit too similar. The "mash a single button" combo system certainly does the game no favors in this area, even more so when the game has so few buttons to press.
The roles of various functions seem pretty solidly set. While most fighting games offer a mix of exploring options within the systems and exploring to find methods of subverting or circumventing the systems, DBFZ feels like there isn't much to explore within the system (and I don't know that it will allow much if any exploration outside either.)
Thinking about it, FighterZ mechanically seems closer to the 3D DBZ games (Legends, Budokai, Xenoverse, etc) that we've been getting for around the last 20 years than it does a regular fighting game (or something like Super DBZ).
EDIT: As for the camera difference, games with 3D graphics tend to use "realistic" cameras. But 2D animation (both spritework games as well as stuff like films and TV shows) often used art styles that did not fit "realistic" cameras. With Guilty Gear Xrd, Arc System Works tried to mimic the appearance of traditional 2D games while using 3D models. A large part of this, and a lot of the actual work, comes down to employing various camera tricks like forced perspective.
For example, in a traditional 2D game, a character's sprite is the same width (and presented at the same angle) no matter where it is on the screen. With a traditional 3D camera, a character at the edge of the screen is slightly further from the camera than a character at the center (and is also presented at a slightly different angle), and is thus "smaller", and thus that character at the edge of the screen isn't as wide in pixels on the display screen. Humans expect this changing width, so we don't really think about it, but it is one of the reasons traditional 3D graphics don't quite match 2D sprite games.
Another example is that 2D artists will exaggerate perspective to make more dynamic images. A punch towards the screen will explode in size, while a trailing leg will shrink to a point, and all this will appear against a background that itself might require a completely different lens setting. To recreate this with 3D models, ASW rigged the models to scale the size of parts as necessary, to display the desired resulting image (when viewed with a known fixed camera. If you don't know the camera settings, then you won't know how to distort the models.) They do similar tricks with the backgrounds themselves, using distorted models placed at unrealistic distances in order to recreate the desired mimickry of parallax scrolling of 2D art.
[this message was edited by Baines on Tue 30 Jan 09:03] |
| | "Re(4):Dragon Ball FighterZ" , posted Tue 30 Jan 09:47
quote:
Thinking about it, FighterZ mechanically seems closer to the 3D DBZ games (Legends, Budokai, Xenoverse, etc) that we've been getting for around the last 20 years than it does a regular fighting game (or something like Super DBZ).
Someone please, please, please put out SDBZ2.
I won't have the game until Thursday at the earliest but from what I played in the beta, the game felt like a good combination of the old Budokai-ish mechanics and also more of the regular fighting games (KOF, GG).
Basically, if you center your gameplay around the Budokai-ish mechanics like the super dash, beans, or autocombos, they're convenient and easy but you'll end up doing relatively small damage. On the other hand if you focus on a more traditional-style game, the damages you can do can end up a lot higher since you'll have additional options to extend your combos (doing superdash limits them).
All in all I think it's certainly true that the characters in this game aren't too unique from one another and they're more like "variants".
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| "Re(5):Dragon Ball FighterZ" , posted Tue 30 Jan 18:05
quote:
It probably doesn't help that two thirds of the cast are running around in orange and blue rompers or are variants of the same guy. Where are Roshi or that girl who has personality issues when she sneezes? Variation is good and Monster Hunter lets me make a customized cat while DBFZ doesn't appear to have Puar... I know where my money is going.
Everyone in DBFZ can fly and fire projectiles.
Characters like Roshi, Lunch/Launch, Videl, Mr. Satan, and anyone else fundamentally mechanically different would require...well...a mechanical difference in a game where the entire roster is mechanically the same.
Aksys is no stranger to characters with mechanical exceptions, like how Potemkin lacks everyone else's dashing options in GG.
I do enjoy the idea of someone like Lunch (seems more viable than Bulma nowadays...) going into battle with an arsenal of weapons packed into capsules that could be summoned and discarded on a moment's notice (and possibly used as traps, for a bit more mechanical distinction), but what could she even use as an alternative to everyone else's hyper dash? Even if that were something like an instantly summoned and discardable vehicle she'd crash into the opponent, she'd still risk being mostly a projectile-heavy character, something the game has no shortage of...
...!!
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| | "Re(6):Dragon Ball FighterZ" , posted Tue 30 Jan 18:07
I'm a little disappointed that Bulma isn't playable. Hopefully when the day comes that Toriyama Fighting All-Stars is made, I can finally field a team of Bulma, Arale, and Lucca!
The things I have to say about the game are:
- it is extremely good looking and sounding
- the game is entirely playable to a beginner with just three buttons: light attack, ki blast, and super dash. super dash is a combination of Arcana Heart's homing dash and Guilty Gear's Dust. It is extremely powerful and essential.
- the strong prevalence of universal systems gives the game a certain Melty Blood or KOFish quality, in that the characters are very alike in many ways.
- it only took how many years for a AAA fighting game to steal a universal dash being projectile invulnerable from IaMP?
- damage scaling gets fairly intense, so it's difficult to kill a person in a single combo unless you've got lots of meter, sparking blast, and maybe assists. Combined with the position reset after somebody gets KO'd, matches among beginners can be fairly lengthy, and there's a lot of opportunity for back and forth.
Some things I don't like about the game:
- the extreme accessibility that they've made with the controls and nature of the character normals means that it's very easy for beginners to have fun playing the game, but it's very easy for beginners to get a mistaken notion about the game: that the square button autocombo works so reliably in some many contexts and with every character, that super dash is a universal counter to ki blast and leads to square button combo, that the throw leads to square button combo, that the throw is beaten by square button combo, that the square button combo works from regular jumps or when standing, that the square button combo automatically grants dragon balls, and that the square button combo is used for activating the dragon balls can give people the feeling that the whole game is just about mashing square and super dash and it doesn't matter who you pick!
- having normals that are not stubby is the exception more than the rule. Combined with double jump, air dash, teleport attack, super dash (which goes through ki blasts), the fact that tagging in invokes a super dash... well, it can seem like everyone is in everyone else's face constantly, and that there's no real way to zone or play a fencing game with the normals. The normals often have fairly substantial recovery, too, which is overcome by chaining them or cancelling them... again, encouraging you to do normals at ranges where they will hit, which is close up!
- i wish ki blasts did more damage and had some highish forced proration in order to prevent them from being too strong in combos. I say this because using ki blasts to control or threaten the opponent feels really empty a lot of the time. It just doesn't do much, in spite of how cool it looks and how huge it is, which just feels wrong!
- that using double jump, air dash, and super dash along with f+M as your universal overhead threats and everybody has them and they all function the same gives it a certain KOFish or Melty Bloodish offense.
There is some good stuff that I wish the game was just a little more up front about (as in, maybe in Intermediate Tutorials). Did you know that you can not only go through ki blasts with super dash, but that you can guard cancel into super dash if you are just blocking ki blasts? That's AWESOME! Did you know that whether or not you can jump cancel a ground normal changes depending on whether it's blocked or not (atypical for ArcSys!) but that going into Sparking Blast makes ALL normals jump cancellable on block? THAT'S KIND OF A BIG DEAL! Did you know that you can air recover just by holding an attack button, rather than needing to mash it and hope you hit the frame? Did you know that super dash can clash with super dash?
- the matchmaking was kinda busted in every type of match making
And the just plain random:
- everybody in the game has multiple palette swaps, but none of the palette swaps change the color of their skin, which is fairly different from palette swaps in every other 2D fighting game ever made (largely because palette size limitations often meant that changing skin color was often inevitable when changing the colors of other areas!)
Generally speaking:
- one thing which certainly seems to be the case when it comes to everybody being in everybody's face all the time is that it can feel like no matter which character is currently being played, the game only has one pace, and the fights are always happening without a lot of granularity in terms of distance. The finer points of distance and spacing will certainly become more apparent with increased proficiency at the game, but at the beginner level, the sense of distances and pacing are not nearly as immediately obvious as in, say, Street Fighter.
- a game which looks really good and which feels good to hit people in goes a long ways towards making you want to come back to a game!
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| | "Re(7):Dragon Ball FighterZ" , posted Wed 31 Jan 06:58
quote:
I'm a little disappointed that Bulma isn't playable. Hopefully when the day comes that Toriyama Fighting All-Stars is made, I can finally field a team of Bulma, Arale, and Lucca!
The things I have to say about the game are:
- it is extremely good looking and sounding
- the game is entirely playable to a beginner with just three buttons: light attack, ki blast, and super dash. super dash is a combination of Arcana Heart's homing dash and Guilty Gear's Dust. It is extremely powerful and essential.
- the strong prevalence of universal systems gives the game a certain Melty Blood or KOFish quality, in that the characters are very alike in many ways.
- it only took how many years for a AAA fighting game to steal a universal dash being projectile invulnerable from IaMP?
- damage scaling gets fairly intense, so it's difficult to kill a person in a single combo unless you've got lots of meter, sparking blast, and maybe assists. Combined with the position reset after somebody gets KO'd, matches among beginners can be fairly lengthy, and there's a lot of opportunity for back and forth.
Some things I don't like about the game:
- the extreme accessibility that they've made with the controls and nature of the character normals means that it's very easy for beginners to have fun playing the game, but it's very easy for beginners to get a mistaken notion about the game: that the square button autocombo works so reliably in some many contexts and with every character, that super
-- Message too long, Autoquote has been Snipped --
Good stuff Spoon.
Do we actually know what high-level play will look like at this point? I'm wondering how entertaining we can expect the game to be for spectating. If this game were hype at EVO, I would be pretty happy.
/ / /
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| | "DragonBall beaten by Jojo" , posted Wed 7 Feb 23:46
So it's been a week since DBFZ launched in Japan and the figures are in: The game sold 68,731 units, according to figures by Media Create via 4Gamer.
So what this essencially means is that DBFZ beat Street Fighter V (41,990 units) as expected, but it didn't reach anywhere near Jojo ASB's Diamond Unbreakable record of 425,718 units
Of course we also know what happened to Jojo ASB soon after its launch, as it got plagued with so many problems that'd put Purple Haze to shame.
Still though, it's a bit surprising that a huge title like Dragonball not only didn't come close to Jojo's sales, it didn't even reach the 6 digits. After all, DragonBall was a LOT more mainstream than Jojo and always had the top pages of the thick Shonen Jump weeklies whereas Jojo was always printed somewhere in its middle.
As usual these figures are physical sales only, which is fine because digital sales isn't that high in Japan.
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| "Re(1):DragonBall beaten by Jojo" , posted Thu 8 Feb 01:10
quote:
So it's been a week since DBFZ launched in Japan and the figures are in: The game sold 68,731 units, according to figures by Media Create via 4Gamer.
So what this essencially means is that DBFZ beat Street Fighter V (41,990 units) as expected, but it didn't reach anywhere near Jojo ASB's Diamond Unbreakable record of 425,718 units
Of course we also know what happened to Jojo ASB soon after its launch, as it got plagued with so many problems that'd put Purple Haze to shame.
Still though, it's a bit surprising that a huge title like Dragonball not only didn't come close to Jojo's sales, it didn't even reach the 6 digits. After all, DragonBall was a LOT more mainstream than Jojo and always had the top pages of the thick Shonen Jump weeklies whereas Jojo was always printed somewhere in its middle.
As usual these figures are physical sales only, which is fine because digital sales isn't that high in Japan.
How does that compare to other DBZ games? While the game is cool there are plenty of ways to get your DragonBall fix so is DBFZ going to bring in people who don't play fighting games?
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| | "Re(4):DragonBall (not) beaten by chip damage" , posted Wed 14 Feb 06:49
A random thought about the game:
Chip damage is EXTREMELY weak in this game. Most S button moves, which are fireballs, inflict 0 damage on block. Supers inflict very little block damage. For an ArcSys game, let alone a Vs. game, this is quite unusual.
Seeing as how as the game develops, projectiles can serve as combo starters thanks to Vanish, having projectiles not do TOO much damage is overall for the best. However, I think I'd be pretty ok with projectiles doing good chip damage except that all the chip damage is recoverable damage. I think that'd strike a good balance in making blocking the ki blasts something that feels "dangerous", while not making chip damage a dominating element of the game. You already can't kill people with chip damage in the game, anyway.
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| "Re(5):DragonBall (not) beaten by chip damage" , posted Fri 23 Feb 20:25
I only very recently realized TenShinHan loses HP when he uses his super, holy shit... I recall it being a hazard for him to use it in the series, but still... I wonder if there's some way to mitigate that, like having all 7 levels of power bar.
This ends up reminding me I recall reading something similar regarding Iori and his flames in the KoF series, although that never translated into gameplay... could become a way to moderate his usual dominance across the series, especially now that he has a whole style based on not using the flames, if they implemented some sort of stance system...
Back to DBFZ, having started Story mode about a week or so ago, I'm almost done with the 2nd major chapter, and I wonder if I should go back to the 1st one to level up characters (both for stat bonuses and unlocking the Link events, not to mention blue Goku and Vegeta) while getting the cutscenes I missed the first time, since I'm getting fewer Perfect victories in my plot progression so far, and find myself having to swap characters more frequently...
...!!
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| "Re(7):DragonBall (not) beaten by chip damage" , posted Sat 24 Feb 01:36
quote:
Back to DBFZ, having started Story mode about a week or so ago, I'm almost done with the 2nd major chapter, and I wonder if I should go back to the 1st one to level up characters (both for stat bonuses and unlocking the Link events, not to mention blue Goku and Vegeta) while getting the cutscenes I missed the first time, since I'm getting fewer Perfect victories in my plot progression so far, and find myself having to swap characters more frequently...
If you want to earn Zeny, it might be better to just keep on going and beat the first loop of the story mode since you get higher level gem(?)s in the second loop (hard mode).
I haven't been thinking much of Zeni, but I guess a non-SSJ Trunks lobby icon won't unlock itself.
Maybe after completing story mode there will be higher-level EXP bonus equipment? I've just been sticking with the Attack damage ones for now, but the EXP bonus stuff should be useful on a replay when trying to unlock Link events and getting the remaining team/opponent-specific cutscenes.
I should probably spend more time on training mode though, at least trying to complete the combo trials - at this opint super dash into mash with occasional assist calls is starting to show its limits (or maybe the problem is I always swap my non-max-HP characters for my lowest-level ones to give them a chance to level up, so the level average is getting lower).
...!!
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| | "Re(8):DragonBall (not) beaten by chip damage" , posted Sat 24 Feb 20:50:
quote:
I haven't been thinking much of Zeni, but I guess a non-SSJ Trunks lobby icon won't unlock itself.
Maybe after completing story mode there will be higher-level EXP bonus equipment? I've just been sticking with the Attack damage ones for now, but the EXP bonus stuff should be useful on a replay when trying to unlock Link events and getting the remaining team/opponent-specific cutscenes.
I should probably spend more time on training mode though, at least trying to complete the combo trials - at this opint super dash into mash with occasional assist calls is starting to show its limits (or maybe the problem is I always swap my non-max-HP characters for my lowest-level ones to give them a chance to level up, so the level average is getting lower).
The equipments on the maps levels up +1 per chapter, and it goes up to Lv.6 by Ch.3 in hard mode.
If your main means of attacking is mashing weak attack after super dash, it's probably doing only about half the damage of a manual combo. If you can (and I'm sure you can since I've seen you at the tournament back in KOF13), you might want to try doing the basic combo in the game which is cr.a, cr.b, st.b, j.a, j.b, j.down+c, air superdash, j.a, j.b, air jump, j.a, j.a, j.a. (annotations: a=weak, b=medium, c=fierce) It's universal for most characters leave aside exceptions like Cell and Freezer. It'll give a hard knockdown to the opponent, making them slide all the way to the corner.
[this message was edited by Professor on Sat 24 Feb 22:45] |
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| "Re(9):DragonBall (not) beaten by chip damage" , posted Mon 26 Feb 18:58:
quote:
The equipments on the maps levels up +1 per chapter, and it goes up to Lv.6 by Ch.3 in hard mode.
If your main means of attacking is mashing weak attack after super dash, it's probably doing only about half the damage of a manual combo. If you can (and I'm sure you can since I've seen you at the tournament back in KOF13), you might want to try doing the basic combo in the game which is cr.a, cr.b, st.b, j.a, j.b, j.down+c, air superdash, j.a, j.b, air jump, j.a, j.a, j.a. (annotations: a=weak, b=medium, c=fierce) It's universal for most characters leave aside exceptions like Cell and Freezer. It'll give a hard knockdown to the opponent, making them slide all the way to the corner.
Thanks, I've got to give that a try, or at least parts of it to try and get used to it.
Funny how in most fighting games with projectiles I tend to rely on those when fighting the computer, but but between mechanics and a feel for how battles played out in the series, it just feels natural to charge into opponents with the dash instead of abusing the 1-button (multi-)projectile option, so I find myself dropping a bad habit to adopt a new one which too needs to be resisted at some point.
For all I've read over the years about in KoF the system being more important than individual character abilities, I've never felt it as strongly as I do in this one - I guess in games where the odds of an opponent having projectiles that can interrupt my actions before I even reach them I feel more at ease experimenting with specials and how they help establish a feel for how a character should be played in terms of range, for example. Between DBFZ's universal systems and the swapping of characters, there are character whose specials I've barely seen outside the prompted tutorial section of chapter 1 in Story mode and the character-specific combo training. Surely that changes at other levels, and I'm curious to see the kind of spectacle this'll provide by the time EVO comes around.
Neat little thing I noticed fighting Krillin the other day - at least in of of the greener stages, if you interrupt him with an attack soon after he does that regular special version of that weird projectile of his that lands vertically after a while, that projectile lands in the stage's background... the little things in this game, seriously...
Also, I wonder if 18 getting an alternate outfit early in her section of the story mode bumps the odds of her getting that as DLC later down the line - I like her classic outfit, but it's still weird to see the Red Ribbon logo there (not as weird as seeing it swapping sides in 16's chest, which shouldn't really be a thing...).
...!!
[this message was edited by Loona on Wed 28 Feb 01:34] |
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| "Yayoiori!" , posted Mon 5 Mar 04:42
quote:
I only very recently realized TenShinHan loses HP when he uses his super, holy shit... I recall it being a hazard for him to use it in the series, but still... I wonder if there's some way to mitigate that, like having all 7 levels of power bar.
This ends up reminding me I recall reading something similar regarding Iori and his flames in the KoF series, although that never translated into gameplay... could become a way to moderate his usual dominance across the series, especially now that he has a whole style based on not using the flames, if they implemented some sort of stance system...
You figure Iori over the years wouldn't take hits well as he carries those flames like Gouki. Not the case. Then again, Dejiko likes him the way he is. Otherwise, SNK would be hit by those beams of hers.
My youngest brother likes the game. I'll play it sooner or later. Honestly though, I'd prefer an updated version of the final Super Fami "Yuu Yuu Hakusho" game, which of course is a Namco game.
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is ridiculously quick, his auto-combo leads straight into further juggle combos, and 
