Hands on with Dragon Ball FighterZ, one of the most ambitious fighting games ever created

The Bandai Namco booth at gamescom last week was packed with anime fans from across the globe looking to try out the next best installments in their favorite games. Out of all these games, however, one stood out: Dragon Ball FighterZ.

We had the chance to go behind the scenes and play the game well before its scheduled release in February 2018.

Dragon Ball FighterZ is created by Arc System Works, the team behind the Guilty Gear and BlazBlue series. The game takes the popular characters from the Dragonball universe and pits them against each other in three-on-three tag-team fights.

The game was first shown off as part of Microsoft’s E3 press conference in June. It’s slowly been building hype thanks to some promotional tournaments at major fighting game events like Evo, allowing players to compete against each other in small tournaments on-site.

At a base level, a fighting game is about one thing—fighting. Dragon Ball FighterZ, however, is looking to be more than just your standard two-dimensional fighting game.

A Bandai representative told Dot Esports at gamescom that the developers were constantly looking at ways to create characters that weren’t strong, but had other abilities that helped the team in other ways. One of these characters includes Krillin, who has a one-time healing ability that could be used to heal an ally during a battle.

Using these special abilities in game, however, is not as easy as it sounds. In the middle of a hectic fight, timing is everything, so it was always difficult to find the right moment to use Krillin’s special ability in between all the chaos.

Still, it is good to see that there is a lot more to the game than flashy special moves and standard combos. Top players will be able to use each character in a multitude of ways to make a great team composition, and it will be interesting to see how fighters in the game will be handled when the full roster is released in the future.

Bandai fighting games, such as Tekken and Pokken, have had bustling scenes in the past which means the likelihood of a Dragon Ball FighterZ esports scene isn’t too farfetched. For now, the game just needs to continue to ride the hype train all the way to its launch in February 2018 and steadily reveal more and more up until its release.