Dragon Ball FighterZ Story Mode Thoughts

I was initially hesistant towards playing game, I already knew going in that the game was more of a "hardcore" and technical fighter compared to the Budokai and Tenkaichi games which were the Dragon Ball games I grew up on playing. That and when the DBFZ came out I was on a Dragon Ball slump and kind of turned "heel" on the franchise in that time, but I turned "face" on the series now and played a bunch DB games since then. With this recent PS5 version, now was a great time to get into the game.

I thought the game was "good" but I felt the story mode, which is what I'm covering could've been better. Everything about it feels like it could've been better than it was, but it was carried by the game's polish and me being a Dragon Ball fan more so then anything.

I'll start with what I liked, the game's story mode in terms of character interactions, production values, and voice acting(playing it english dubbed) is really well done and has a lot more effort into it than I thought I would, I already knew that going in since I would watch random cutscenes of the game a lot over the years and the scenes with Cell tend to be quite famous. For this alone, the game is worth playing especially if you are a DB fan. The best part of the story mode is that it is NOT a loose retelling of the series "canon" this time around, it is basically kind of an interquel of sorts between of the Dragon Ball Super anime after the Resurrection F movie and before either Universe 6 or Goku Black arcs because of this plus what I previously mentioned, it gives the game's story mode some geniune value.

There is just one thing that holds the story back, and that is how it's told. The game has you finish 3 "arcs" of sorts before you get to the end credits but the way the story is told is very disjointed, the way it was presented, I thought it was going to be like Tenchu 2 and original Resident 2 but disappointingly it's more like Tenchu 3 and the remake of Resident Evil 2. Where maybe 2 arcs which are Super Warriors and Android 21 seem to be "canon" to the game's timeline where the Enemy Warriors just seems to be a "what if" story. I'm not sure which is even canon to the game's true events either, it seems Android 21 arc is since the titular character has the most nuance in that arc but the way Super Warriors arc plays out, I'm not sure which if they are supposed to intersect or be their own self contained stories. This felt like a big missed opportunity because this could've provided some geniune innovation in fighting game story modes over story modes in games like Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter 5, Marvel vs Capcom Infinite, Tekken 8 and the Injustice games.

I will also say the mechanically, it plays pretty well, I'm not a fighting game expert by any means but I can at the very least say the game has a high amount of polish and at the very least nice to play. I also like how some characters like Yamcha and Android 18 play really well and I can even pull off their semi circle special moves some degree of consistency.

This is yet again where the game feels like it was wasted potential. I love how it offers geniune innovation over other fighting game story modes where it has a weird RPG like system where you have your own party and can level up your characters meaning that unlike the MK and Injustice system where you will constantly switch between characters, in DBFZ, you can stick to playing as characters you like playing as, this is great. A downside to this that is a character gets KOed, or has little health left to continue doing consecutive fights you might have to switch to a weaker character with that is underlevelled but my solution to this is to save on point on the map and quit to the menu and load back the game, every time a character I liked got KOed.

This leads to me where the problem lies, what will you be doing in this story mode exactly when not watching cutscenes? Well all you will be doing is fighing constant clones of other characters, fighting the occasional "boss fight" and that's pretty much it. The game's fighting and polish carries much of it and the game is pretty easy for newbies which is how I got to the end at all, but there are occasional random difficulty spikes, either I got complacement or those were in fact difficulty spikes. Your milage may vary. This yet again feels like a great idea but DBFZ feels like one of those games where you can tell it loses steam pretty fast. By the time I was nearing the end of the Android 21 arc, I was starting to get bored and luckily the game does wrap up by that point, but you might feel the burn out sooner.

I'll say this, if you find the story mode too repetitive and samey and you are a Dragon Ball fan, the cutscenes at the very least are worth watching on Youtube.

Overall, I do enjoy FighterZ and it's story mode in spite of my criticisms but it felt like it could've been more than it actually was. There is some innovation here that could've amounted to more.