 Accessibility in fighting games is a huge hot topic in the community, and for good reason. The niche audience for fighting games has been blamed on how hard the games are to get into from a casual perspective. As a direct response to these claims and assumptions, developers have put time and money into making sure that their game can be picked up and played by just about anybody. But making your game easy to pick up isn't exactly as easy as it sounds. If you don't do it well enough, new players will still feel punished for trying to get into the game and will drop it all the same. And if you dumb it down too much, longtime fans of the fighting game genre won't enjoy your game, thus leading to a loss of the already niche audience. Because of how hard it can be to make a game accessible to newcomers, I think it's important to the genre that when a developer does get one of these aspects right, it's important to point it out. Which is the reason I'm going to be making this video covering Dragon Ball Fighters and how I think it handled the accessibility factor of it extremely well. To begin, let's take a look at the way the game handles the auto combo feature. Now by itself, this isn't anything revolutionary. By clicking only one button, your character on screen will perform a string of hits leading to a very basic combo. This string doesn't do much in the way of damage, nor does it give you too much corner carry. It's just something very basic for newcomers to fall back on. But like I said, this concept in and of itself isn't unique to Dragon Ball Fighters, as a ton of other fighting games have systems just like this, but there are differences in the way that Dragon Ball Fighters handles it. For starters, Dragon Ball Fighter's auto combo system isn't an opt-in or opt-out system. Auto combos are a part of the game and you can't turn them off. This is actually different from the ways that other fighting games handled it. In games like Guilty Gear, you choose between a normal mode or a more technical mode, with the technical mode just being like an easy mode. And in games like Marvel vs Capcom Infinite, you can just turn off auto combos altogether. Now while that idea might sound appealing to you at first, I do think it's important to keep in mind that this instantly separates the newcomers from the pros, which in my opinion is an awful way to go about learning the game. If you were to launch up Guilty Gear and pick the technical mode, and then later on decide that you want to get good at the game, you would have to learn an entirely new control scheme before you can even start tackling the real basics. And when it gets to the point that new players come to more experienced players and say, hey, I want to learn this game, what should I do? And right away the answers are usually, oh, make sure to turn off the auto combos, and make sure you pick the manual style of play. At that point, the features you put in to help nurture new players only ended up hurting their growth in the long run. Now compare that to a system where auto combos are enabled for everybody and can't be turned off. In my eyes, that's a system that lets newcomers come in, play the game, learn the basics, and then if they get interested in learning more, they don't have to completely switch up the way they've been playing the game for hours at this point. Another interesting aspect to the Dragon Ball Fighter's auto combo system is the fact that certain moves are locked behind the auto combos. This creates auto combos that look completely different from any of the other organic combos. Again, a system like this lets newcomers see very cool and interesting flashy combos, but then when they see something manual, they'll be like, oh man, I've never even seen that, how do I do that? And when that happens, you have natural growth as a player. Another area where Dragon Ball Fighter's makes a conscious effort to reach out to people new to fighting games is in their simplified commands. With every move being a different variation of quarter circle forward or quarter circle back, it's very easy to see that they wanted to keep these inputs simple in order to cut out the middleman of learning combos for newcomers. It's actually funny because before becoming a YouTuber, I didn't think commands were that big of a problem for new players, but I've received numerous comments asking me how to perform these quarter circle forward motions. So in the end, I think this ended up being a great area of the game to try to reach out to newcomers because I think many fighting game players really don't mind having simplified commands, but harder commands like half circle backs and half circle forwards and SPD motions may have been a deal breaker to these newcomers. And the last area where I think fighters excelled at being welcoming to newcomers is actually an area where I don't think many newcomers even realize that they're being catered to. And that area of the game can be found in the neutral, specifically within the Super Dash function of the game. This is something that can be performed with the press of a button and it sends you hurdling across the screen right towards your opponent and it's actually safe on block. It also has the added bonus of pushing away any key blast and sends them hurdling into the background. When I first saw this feature, I thought it was genius because not only is it fun, it also gives newcomers a way to instantly close the distance between their opponent, which is an area of fighting games that I think requires a very acquired taste. Once you have a good handle on the neutral of a specific game, watching two reuse, throwing fireballs back and forth at each other can actually be pretty entertaining to watch. But this couldn't be further from the truth if you're just a newcomer looking in. You could be watching Daigo's Ryu versus another world-class Ryu, and if they're playing a very zone-based game, newcomers will be bored to tears and just see people spamming Hadukens. And I don't think there's anything newcomers hate more than spamming Hadukens. So adding a button in Dragon Ball FighterZ that basically ignores basic projectiles has to be a huge plus to the enjoyment newcomers get out of this game. But yeah, that's really my piece on accessibility in Dragon Ball FighterZ and how I feel they got it right for the most part. Be sure to let me know your thoughts on accessibility in fighting games down in the comments below, and while you're down there, if you liked this video and channel, make sure to hit the like button and subscribe. Also, if you want to see a really good video on accessibility in general, you should definitely check out Koray Gaming's video. It's a lot more of a wider scope than mine, so I think if you enjoyed this video, you'll definitely enjoy that one. And with that said, thank you for watching. I'm Dato Doha, and I'll see you in the next video.