Dragon Ball FighterZ Open Beta Impressions (presumably)

This notorious trainwreck of an open beta test happened nearly ten years ago at time of me writing this little introductory blurb. I’m still mad about it, and I don’t even fuck with DBFZ like that.

Dragon Ball FighterZ is a great game (or so I’ve heard).

Previous fighting games using the Dragon Ball license have always felt somewhat lacking. Whether it be the Budokai Tenkaichi/Xenoverse games’ focus on visceral, anime-like combat that left hardcore fighting game players without much to sink their teeth into, or the intricately designed gameplay of Super DBZ lacking that hyperkinetic flash the series proper had gained its reputation for, Dragon Ball fans and fighting game fans alike have all been left wanting at some point. This was all set to change with DBFZ, a game that (allegedly) marries the visual flair of previous DBZ fighters with the kind of crazy but solid gameplay mechanics that Arc System Works are known for, creating an experience both casual Dragon Ball fans and competitive fighting game players alike can enjoy (probably).

With a robust, if somewhat rough around the edges, set of mechanics (reportedly), a varied and interesting cast of characters (reputedly), and a slew of different gameplay modes to appease casual and hardcore fans alike (apparently), Dragon Ball FighterZ looks set to take both the competitive fighting game community and the Dragon Ball fan community by storm (hopefully).

There’s a reason why I’m describing all of these aspects as merely “potential”, and if you also played the DBFZ open beta, you will probably not have to think too long on why that is. My experience is hardly unique.

I did not get to play a single match of this game against a human opponent over the entire course of the open beta, including the extra day that was given specifically to address the complaints of people not getting to play it. Hell, I barely got to play the game proper at all, with a grand total of one trial battle on my record before the extended beta ended just shy of two hours before I wrote this.

To that end, there’s nothing I can really tell you about DBFZ. From the one trial battle I got to play (seemingly through dumb luck, as I never got the option to play another again), I was randomly assigned three characters to fight in a standard CPU battle with no way of configuring my controls and barely any breathing room to really explore the characters that got thrown at me. I learned that the game looks nice, it controls well, and that’s about it.

My entire experience outside of that one small taste of actual gameplay was a seemingly endless cycle of waiting anywhere between five and ten minutes for the next network error to boot me back to the title screen with nothing to do in the interim — no training mode, no manually accessible trial battles, not even a basic tutorial. For all I know, Dragon Ball FighterZ is just an online chatroom with limited avatar customisation; a Dragon Ball-themed video game recreation of a certain Fairly Odd Parents joke.

I’m sure Dragon Ball FighterZ is a good game. Those who have played it are very optimistic about the game’s overall direction, there’s a lot of hype around the game’s release, and from what I can tell it’s all deserved. But given that I have no way of actually confirming that, because every attempt to play the game was met with unexplained network issues and no way of experiencing the game beyond that. The overall impression the game left me with was one of nothing at all, which is honestly more disappointing than a bad impression, because if the latter was the case, at least I would have gotten to experience what was advertised to me.