 How's it going everybody? Dato Doi here with another Dragon Ball Fighters video. And recently I've been seeing a lot of comments from people new to the game asking how they should go about improving at it. I don't really know if it's because the Nintendo Switch version recently came out or because the game's just been going on sale more frequently as the Season 1 DLC is finally all wrapped up, but regardless it just seemed like a really good time to release a very quick, very summarized guide at how you should go about leveling up at Fighters. Now I will say right now this video will assume that you went through the tutorial and you've already picked your team. If you want any advice on team building I do have a separate video on that, but trust me if you're new to Fighters just pick three of your favorite characters and you will be just fine. And if you're looking for more team oriented stuff feel free to post in the comments that you're new to the game and also post your team and if I have anything that I know about that team I'll go ahead and chime in and if I don't really know about those characters I'm sure somebody else in the comment plays them and can help you out in some way. And now we can move on to the steps to getting better at Dragon Ball Fighters. So the first thing you should do after you complete the tutorial and get your team selected is go into training mode. Obviously if you haven't messed around with your characters buttons and special moves this would be the time to do that. Once you've gotten that out of the way though it's time to learn our first combo in Dragon Ball Fighters and start having some fun. The combo I'm about to teach you isn't the best in the game but it's almost universal amongst the cast and the combo also involves a lot of things that we're going to have to learn if we want to hit those harder more character specific combos later on down the line. The combo basically goes like this. First you hit them with a down medium and immediately go into a standing medium. Immediately after that connects you're going to want to jump in what's known as a jump cancel. This cancels the animation of your move and allows you to act again. For the purpose of this combo let's just hit them with a light and medium and instantly do a down heavy. We'll follow our opponent with the super dash where once we've caught up to them we'll hit them with another light and another medium and then go into another down heavy. This is where it gets tricky though because we're going to want to do another jump cancel. You see we get one jump on the ground and then we get another in the air. After that we just spam lights which picks our character up enough to knock our opponent back down to the ground resulting in a sliding knockdown. This knockdown portion is where we learn the next important part of offense which is the wake-up game so you'll always know when you get the sliding knockdown because the game will make this sound effect. The opponent will also go sliding across the floor after they hit it hence the term sliding knockdown. Now in this state your opponent has a couple of options the most popular being to tech up which pops them up off the ground to tech back which sends them backwards a little and to tech down which pretty much just keeps their character on the floor for a little while. You do this by holding a button and a direction correlating to the direction you want to tech by the way. For future reference when you get hit with a sliding knockdown it's important to keep mixing these up to keep your opponent guessing. In our case though since we're talking about offense this allows us the chance to continue pressure our opponent and maybe even get a second combo off if they don't play their cards right. Let's say for example you have them in the corner when you get this sliding knockdown they're forced to tech up or back or down and because their options are limited to that you can create setups which allows you to hit them and make them block again. Dashing in like this is a great way to maintain pressure and make sure your opponent can't go on offense. There is another form of knockdown which is even better than sliding because it doesn't allow the opponent to tech at all they just have to slowly get off the ground. The way you can do this is that after landing a sliding knockdown you can use your character's level three and that will force your opponent into a hard knockdown. In this state they can't choose so their options are limited to one and they just have to slowly get off the ground meaning you can try and open them out however you want. Landing an early level three on your opponent in the beginner ranks is pretty much a death sentence for them and an instant win for you because people will crack as soon as they have to play any defense. Which is why before you hop online and try to get some wins you should definitely try and practice your defense a little. This is definitely where most newcomers to Dragon Ball Fighters and fighting games in general suffer. Don't get me wrong defense is far from being as flashy and as fun as offense but it's an important part of your game because if you can't even block anything your opponent's throwing out then there is no chance of you hitting any of those combos you spent so much time practicing. So very quickly let's go over the basics of defense. So to block your opponent's attacks you always hold back from where their point character is but unfortunately it's not that easy as just standing and blocking allows them to hit you with any low attacks that's no problem though is in order to block low attacks we can simply just hold back and down or down back away from our opponents. Unfortunately this also comes with its downsize as although we can block lows and standing attacks we're open to overheads and any aerial normals. So really the trick here is that you just have to eventually learn how to get good on defense. I will give you some tips though the way you should block most attacks is by crouching down back this is because lows come out a lot faster than overheads so this basically gives you more time to react to stuff. If you can get this down then you'll be fine in most of the early ranks all the way up to let's say Super Saiyan 2. At that point you might start seeing more people using dragon rush which completely negates blocking altogether. The way you can counter this is either by jumping or by dragon rushing it yourself which is called teching a throw. At this point in the game you also might have to look out for opponents trying to cross you up or in other words since you're holding back and away from them they might try to jump over from you switch the direction away from them means and hit you that way. As you work your way up your ladder your defense will always have to evolve to keep up with your opponents evolving offense. Like I said though the only way to practice this is to see setups learn from them and either learn on the fly or take those setups into training mode later record them and then guard them yourself. There will also come a time when you'll have to implement guard canceling and reflecting. To guard cancel after you block a hit you quickly hold forward and your assist button and your character will come flying in off screen switching out with your other character and to reflect you just click back in Key Blast which pushes the opponent away. These aren't too necessary for early ranks but they will come in handy later on down the line. So at this point in the game you probably have a very basic offensive plan with sliding knockdowns and hard knockdowns if you have the meter and making sure you take advantage of those times when you do get sliding knockdowns and you also have a very basic understanding of defense but you have no player experience yet but that's still probably going to put you above most other people in ranked at your level. So now you're ready to hop into your first online game and you're going to see that you're going to get absolutely destroyed most likely. You're going to start panicking the person's actually moving you can't hit your combos online like you can in training mode even though you hit them so many times and I just want you to know this is completely natural it happens to everybody when they're first starting. The online environment is very different to training mode and you have to practice in online just as you practice in training mode. I wish I could tell you there's a trick to this but there's really not you kind of just have to ram your head into the online world and you'll start hitting your combos sooner rather than later and you'll start actually defending stuff and you'll see that if you put the time in you're going to level up very quickly in this game. After you get used to the online environment you can start practicing block strings to make sure that you can connect into those combos more and then after you get used to doing block strings for your character you can learn character specific combos and all of this is stuff that you should look up online for your specific character so if you play kid boo look up kid boo block strings kid boo combos and it's around this point where you're also going to start implementing your assist more whether it be to keep your opponent blocking or to just extend combos this is the part of your game plan where assist are really going to come into everything so at this point let's say it's been a couple of weeks you've already become a pretty decent player at this game and you should have everything you need to become as good as you want to as long as you're willing to put in the time and actually seek out information for your team whether it be through looking up stuff online or just seeking it out on your own in training mode. Other than that I'll leave you with a few frequently asked questions that you might want answers to if you're new to the game as I receive these questions a lot question one is how do you get super moves from your other characters without doing a super with your point character first the answer to this is simple you simply do a half circle motion and click the assist button and your character will do either a level one or a level three depending on if you did the half circle forward or half circle back question two is why do you do an empty heavy attack when you're falling from the air this is to make sure that you don't mess up the super input at all if you don't use the heavy you're just waiting to hit the ground before inputting your super but if you do use the heavy in the air this will allow you to just spam out your super input and it'll only come out once you hit the ground it's basically a way to make sure you always get the super 100% of the time instead of getting that really pesky dragon rush in the air throwing the game question three is how do you do an empty vanish that's only available to you in sparking blast mode which is probably something I should have talked about more but it basically just regenerates a lot of your health and allows you to dash after key blast moves in the air and basically makes your character all around more powerful one of the things that does allow you to hold the vanish button to just simply teleport behind your opponent and the rest is up to whatever you decide to do with that that is pretty much everything you need in order to hit the ground running with dragon ball fighters whether it be that you're new to the game or you've been playing it for a while but just now want to start getting into it either competitively or online this guy should hopefully help you get started and cruise right into the high ranks where you can start improving just by playing once again if you need any help or clarification on anything at all make sure to leave me a comment and I will try to reply to that as soon as possible and if I either I can't reply to it or I don't see it somebody else I'm sure will help you out with that while you're down in the comments if you like this video and like the channel make sure to hit the like button and subscribe and hey maybe click on a few of the other videos that should be on your screen right about now I really do appreciate it as always I'm Dr. Doe and I'll see you in the next video