 How's it going everybody? Dato Doi here with another Dragon Ball Fighters video. But this one's going to be a little different as it's been over a year since I first laid my eyes on this image. This was actually the first time I saw Dragon Ball Fighters leaked in any way. Obviously the game didn't have its title quite yet, but this image did show off a lot of things that made me crazy excited for it. 2.5D traditional fighting game arc system works. This was going to be the thing that really brought me full force back into fighting games. Because at the time quite frankly a lot of things were just bumming me out. I didn't enjoy Street Fighter 5 as much as I thought I was going to and the footage of MVCI just really bummed me out as somebody that really enjoyed the Marvel experience. In fact it's actually kind of funny the only fighting game I was really playing back then was Guilty Gear, so that only really added to the excitement of seeing my favorite franchise be tackled in such a way. Of course even though I was excited I kind of thought in the back of my head that it all sounded a bit too good to be true. There was simply no way a game this perfect for me would ever actually exist. Luckily though I was proven wrong at E3 when they showed it off during the Xbox press conference, I must have watched that trailer at least 100 times. It was just that exciting. After that I was pretty much done. All I wanted to do was wait for Dragon Ball Fighters, talk about Dragon Ball Fighters, and you can imagine that would get pretty annoying for my friend so I just decided to make a YouTube channel where I would talk about the game extensively. By the way welcome this is uh this is that channel. Anyway once the game got into its open beta state I played it and really enjoyed it. So I started to make daily videos for it and that leads us all the way up to where we are now more than a year of time has passed which is just crazy to say. And it's because it's been so long that I decided to do a video like this where I would talk about Dragon Ball Fighters, how the game has evolved over the course of its lifespan, where I think the game is right now, and where I think it's going to be in a couple of months down the line. This is also going to involve things I thought the game did really well and areas that I think could be expanded upon to make it a better experience. So let's start with that first topic of how the game evolved over the course of its lifespan. During the first few weeks after the initial release a common complaint levied at Dragon Ball Fighters was that the cast was a little too homogenized and the depth of the game was overall a little lacking. After those initial couple of weeks though individual character tech did start to take off, more things were being discovered for characters giving them more nuance and thus more depth was added to the overall game. Still to this day Dragon Ball Fighters is not the hardest game to learn by any stretch of the imagination and some of the cast members still definitely feel super similar to one another. There's a lot of Goku's in this game, there's a lot of Vegeta's, and you really have to work hard at making character gimmicks unique to each one of them if you want to avoid this type of homogenization. But Dragon Ball Fighters didn't really do this to the best of their ability, so you're always going to have some samey feelings here and there. But again I do want to specify that over time each character kind of got into their own role, so Krillin does not play anything like Yamcha for example. After those initial complaints Dragon Ball Fighters really didn't receive too much criticism other than the fact that the game overall is very offensive and there isn't too many defensive mechanics which is still very much the case to this day even with some buffed guard cancel stuff here and there. Though I think at this point the developers have made themselves clear that Dragon Ball Fighters is just meant to be a more offensive based game and I think those that enjoy that type of game are definitely going to feel more at home here. Keeping that in mind though a couple months later we ran into some really rough meta problems where a lot of the pros were picking very similar characters. Super Saiyan Vegeta's assist was just super good, Cell overall as a character was just kind of completely nuts and we started to see a lot of samey teams at a high level. Thankfully though this was around the time the game got patched, shifting up some things a little bit, Vegeta's assist wasn't quite as good anymore, Cell was still pretty much the same but other characters had gotten options taken away from them. Android 16 lost his crazy level 3 post wake up oki and another big part of the patch was just that because of it people start experimenting with different characters. This was around the time that people actually started looking at go tanks, piccolo started getting picked up and played a little more, TN etc etc it basically led to a healthier meta overall and this process pretty much continued over the course of Dragon Ball Fighters first year. We got new DLC characters along the way, some more fun than others, Bardock and Broly for example, definitely a more fun pair than base Goku and base Vegeta but overall things were going very smooth during this time. A couple of different patches were put out, pros were experimenting with characters more and it was just a really fun time to watch and play the game. EVO came around and Dragon Ball Fighters was a Sunday game breaking viewership records for the tournament. This is also where we got another video for base Goku and base Vegeta as well as a teaser for cooler and later on down the line 17. Unfortunately though after EVO there was not a lot of content for Dragon Ball Fighters to show off to the casual players even though we were still a couple of months away from the Dragon Ball Fighters World Tour finals in January. This led to a super long drought period for the game where big content like characters just simply weren't being added or even teased for that matter. We were kind of in the dark if Dragon Ball Fighters would even receive a Season 2 at all but for those that did stick around through the wait we did get a pretty fantastic tournament in the Dragon Ball Fighters World Tour finals where it was revealed that Jiren and Videl would be joining the game along with four other unknown characters in the Season 2 pass for Dragon Ball Fighters. They actually revealed that two of the other fighters were Gojita Blue and Dragon Ball Super Broly and that pretty much catches you up to date with Dragon Ball Fighters. We got Jiren and Videl in January as well as an announcement for Dragon Ball Fighters World Tour Season 2. Unfortunately though all of that was announced a month ago and it seems we're in another dry period for news. And that brings us nicely into our second talking point where will Dragon Ball Fighters be in a few months. Just recently the people that run the EVO tournament put out their annual stream announcing which games were going to be a part of the main lineup. Dragon Ball Fighters did in fact make it securing the game a spot at Evolution 2019 but unfortunately it is a Saturday game this time meaning it's not going to be along with the other big dogs like Street Fighter V and Tekken 7. We don't entirely know why this decision was made Dragon Ball Fighters like I said broke viewership records. It could be that they want to do another television deal for EVO like they did a couple years ago but that's still unknown. It could just be a decision they made because it they thought it would be the best for the tournament. Over the past couple of weeks Mr. Wizard has also been putting out charts showing which games were in the lead in terms of people registering to compete at EVO for them and Dragon Ball Fighters came in near the bottom of the list. And even though these are just numbers for early registration this does show that Dragon Ball Fighters may be waning in the eyes of some players. Perhaps what the game needs is a big patch reorganizing the tier list and shaking things up to get players interested again. But they haven't announced any plans to do anything of the sort that's just something I think they should do to get people more excited. Regardless though it seems that for the next couple of months until the next DLC character gets teased in either a V Jump or for one of the streams they hold in Japan Dragon Ball Fighters will probably be once again in another slow period in terms of content. Whether or not the game will bounce back in time to get people more excited in registering for big tournaments is unknown. I saw recently the JM Cross did a video on if Fighters is dying or not and I definitely think you guys should go give it a watch. I definitely agree with some of the points he made. It's just a really weird time for Fighters right now. But that's pretty much all I have to say on where Fighters will be in the next coming months. Honestly I think as long as they show off Gojita Blue and Broly in time and tell people to go register for EVO if they get excited the game will probably still do relatively well. Up to that though it's going to be up to Bandai Namco and ArcSys to see if they're going to keep producing content for Dragon Ball Fighters or move on to either other games or maybe a Dragon Ball Fighters too. For now though let's talk about the things that I think Fighters does super well and then we'll get into some of the stuff that I'm not too crazy about. Up first we have to talk about the visuals of the game. Of course we'll keep it brief because this one kind of speaks for itself. Dragon Ball Fighters just looks so good. It captures the visual aesthetic from the show and it does it flawlessly. This of course makes it easy for spectators to really get in on the action. Even without knowing too much about fighting games it just kind of looks like an episode of the show. Another thing I think Dragon Ball Fighters really nails is the accessibility. I made an entire video on this topic how I feel Dragon Ball Fighters nails it but to keep it brief I think the game systems create a dynamic learning curve for new players to incrementally learn important parts of the game. If they throw out a key blast and get punished because the opponent super dashed through it then they'll learn how to punish super dash and they'll learn that they should play neutral and through learning neutral they'll learn when they can put on offense etc. Having an easy to understand learning curve makes it super easy for people new to the genre to pick up and play and get to a place where they can really be happy with the progress they've made. And one thing that I'm mixed on in Dragon Ball Fighters is the implementation of the 3v3 combat system. For the most part it's implemented decently well. It does a good job of allowing you to really create a team that's your own by using their assist and how they DHC into each other but I can't help but feel like the system is being held back by only allowing one assist per character and not having that assist be a unique move for the character. To explain this a little more Super Saiyan Vegeta's assist isn't a unique move just for his assist it's just him using a normal move that he can use in his kit. If this was just used sometimes across the cast I would feel differently about it but it's used for literally every character making it just a guessing game of oh will he have a beam assist or oh will that move be his assist no we should get a unique assist for every character and maybe even two unique assists for every character that's kind of asking a lot and definitely something they should look at if they're going to do a sequel to this game ever but yes my feelings on the implementation of the 3v3 part of this game is kind of mixed. Some other things that I feel the game does overall pretty poorly is the story mode of the game. Now I don't think story modes are necessary for a good fighting game and you can get by on just a really interesting arcade mode Dragon Ball FighterZ doesn't have that either but you should never make something a part of your game if you aren't going to go all the way with it. Having a story mode and making it bad is just not a great decision and Dragon Ball FighterZ story is unfortunately super bland. Admittedly though there are cool moments in between the characters and they do have some unique cutscenes but you can tell where the interest lies in the player base when you look up videos like TN Roast Cell or Yamcha gets roasted by 18 but if you look up somebody's playthrough of Dragon Ball FighterZ overall story mode yeah that's probably not going to bring in the clicks. It's simply too stretched out and too boring and if they're going to do this in a future sequel or if they ever want to improve this in a different fighting game I would either say just cut it make it harder or at least give more branching pass and make the fights mean something instead of just going up against an evil version of the characters. Another area where I feel Dragon Ball FighterZ fails is in punishing rage quitting. This is something that drives all players of all skill levels up the wall. Punishing rage quitters by only giving them a purple name is not suitable option. You should just give points to the people that win and take away points from the people that rage quit. And the final thing that I think Dragon Ball FighterZ can really benefit from is communication. Bandai Namco's Twitter really really tries and I appreciate Bandai Namco's Twitter but Dragon Ball FighterZ could really use a Twitter of its own or maybe even a system in game that announces new material is coming up talks to the player base asks the player base how they're feeling about certain things just some bare minimum communication skills. During that painful drought for Dragon Ball FighterZ news it could have all been made better by a simple tweet saying hey guys more Dragon Ball FighterZ is on the way stay tuned. Or even just tweets like yes we are aware of this kind of stuff and our team is working on adding new content and a balance patch. Simple things like that would go a long way in making sure that the community doesn't feel like the game is just being silenced during these long periods in between content. This is the area I would most like Dragon Ball FighterZ to improve on especially if the DLC is only going to get more spaced out. But that's pretty much all I have to say in this video. This is definitely my favorite Dragon Ball game of all time my favorite fighting game of all time and my favorite game of all time so yeah that kind of makes the other two obsolete but still it's a really really good game. Let me know down below in the comments what your story with Dragon Ball FighterZ is and how you think the game is going to progress over the next coming months and while you're down there make sure to leave a like and subscribe to the channel if you enjoyed the video. Speaking of videos there should be some up on your screen so if you want to check out me actually playing this game or other fighting games you can feel free to do so by clicking on any one of those videos. Other than that though thank you so much for watching this video and for sticking with me on this very very long journey that it has been nothing but a blast. I'm Dr. Doia and I will see you guys in the next one.