Dragon Ball FighterZ has certainly been one of the most successful fighting games in recent memory. After an exciting World Tour Finals in Paris earlier this month as well as being announced as a main stage game at this EVO Championship tournament, Dragon Ball FighterZ seems to still be going strong three years into its release. Yet one issue most competitive games face is that as they age, it becomes progressively more difficult for newer or returning players to start up as it becomes harder to catch up to the player base that has stuck with the game. With the upcoming Season 3 update though, comes a multitude of reasons for newer players to pick up the game again and for players that have dropped off to perhaps consider returning to the game.
First off, with a new season comes another Season Pass worth of characters. Five new characters will be joining the roster and players who purchase it will get access to each new character two days before their official release. The first two of these new characters are the very popular and highly demanded Kefla, the fused female Saiyan, as well as Goku in his Ultra Instinct form that debuted during the final episodes of Dragon Ball Super. A quick glimpse of their gameplay can be seen in the trailer linked below.
Ultra Instinct Goku represents pinnacle of Goku’s mastery over martial arts and from the short glances of gameplay in the trailer, this is represented with his animations being very fluid yet minimal. His playstyle seems to revolve around dodges and counters, rewarding players for reading the opponent’s actions and rewarding the player for properly prediction what they are going to do.
Kefla seems to be a high-speed character with a unique set of tricky moves. This includes some sort of aerial dash giving her evasive capabilities and aerial movement unique to the character and a super where she throws six homing orbs at the opponent that explode on contact which seems like it would have a variety of applications.
An issue that Dragon Ball FighterZ has been criticized for is the relatively homogenized movesets among the default roster and a common statement from critics is that characters “play the same,” which is a fair assessment at times. Yet with each DLC character that comes out, it seems the developers are now experimenting with more and more unique movesets for the characters. This could be seen in last season’s Gogeta and Super Broly who’s gameplay styles have been extremely different from the rest of the cast while also being relatively viable competitively and perhaps most important, visually flashy. It seems Kefla and Ultra Instinct Goku will be continuing this trend of refreshing, experimental movesets providing returning players who may have dropped the game due to a character crisis some other options. Also since the roster has now effectively doubled since release, players who have never picked up the game before will be introduced to a massive roster that will surely have something to offer them, whether it be a favorite character or a fun moveset to play with.
In addition to new characters, Season 3 will also be updating the combat mechanics as well. This is perhaps the more important change as it will effectively reset the playing field making it easier to catch up for new and returning players as they will be learning the new mechanics alongside the players who have already stuck with the game. The new changes for Season 3 were briefly touched upon on the trailer linked below featuring producer Tomoko Hiroki.
The first and biggest change incoming will be the ability for players to choose from 3 different assists for each character on their team. This change was requested by the player base for a long time and will go far to change up the game as there were previously characters who were not as chosen as often due to having weak assists and certain characters that were selected among a majority of players due to their assist being much stronger than variety of the casts. This has caused the metagame to become stale and team selections became relatively predictable, but now assist selection will add all sorts of new ways for players to experiment with their roster choices from new combo routes to new potential setups with a wider variety of character choices.
Hiroki also mentions that one of the plans for Season 3 was preventing players from not choosing a character based on certain implicit weaknesses. This means, in addition to the new assist select feature allowing previous characters that had less useful assists to become more viable, character size seems to be less of a factor. It can be seen in the trailer that tall characters can longer be hit jumping attacks even when crouching, removing a huge weakness that tall characters had since the game’s debut. Thus it can also be implied that smaller characters that were harder to hit will now be altered to not have this inherent advantage.
Other examples of combat changes seen in the trailer include a faster snapback animation. The snapback is a mechanic that forces your opponent’s current character to swap into one of the backup characters and when the next character came in, they would be forced into a setup and if they failed to block it, they could either be forced into another snapback or the character would be defeated outright. This strategy was incredibly dominant in top level play and was incredibly difficult for newer players to deal with. It seems to have been removed however as the incoming character now enters play much quicker, giving much less time to start a mixup on them. Also after losing two characters, there seems to be a new comeback mechanic that greatly increases the attack strength for the final character. This will help players be able to have a chance to recover from a bad start and make sure fights are not too one-sided as it was previously incredibly difficult to mount a comeback using only one character against three.
Dragon Ball FighterZ will be getting its Season 3 update on February 26th. On the same day, Season Pass holders will be able to get their hands on Kefla for the first time before her official release on the 28th.
