Dragon Ball FighterZ is the Marvel Vs. Capcom game fans actually want

Many fans in the fighting game community were excited to walk into this year’s E3 and get some hands-on time with Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite, the next game in the long-running fighting game series.

A surprise title was announced during the Xbox press conference that seem to electrify fans much more than any of the expected releases, however.

Dragon Ball FighterZ is the latest fighting game from Arc System Works, the studio responsible for one of the most stylish and visually arresting fighting game franchises, Guilty Gear. The announcement trailer set the anime and fighting game community ablaze, and for good reason.

We’ve finally reached a point in time where graphics, art direction and a studio’s pedigree are able to do something very specific that we’ve wanted for a very long time.

WE FINALLY GET TO play an anime

This isn’t the first time a developer has created a fighting game based on an anime. It’s not even the first outlandish Dragon Ball game. But, while titles like the Dragon Ball Budokai series and the Naruto and One Piece fighting games all do a great job of trying to capture the intense action of their respective anime, most of them tried to do so within a 3D space.

While this approach makes the most sense visually — the Naruto games in particular do a stunning job at recreating scenes from the show — the moment-to-moment gameplay itself seems to suffer in lieu of making space for the earth-shattering super moves and their cinematic presentations.

Dragon Ball FighterZ takes the very best of what Arc System perfected in the recent Guilty Gear Xrd and paired it with what makes Dragon Ball’s anime such a spectacle to watch. And that’s where the biggest distinction finally begins to take hold.

The early Marvel vs. Capcom games were the perfect answer to the question: What if the world’s most famous comic books were a fighting game?

Marvel vs. Capcom felt like it pulled beloved Capcom characters into a comic book. The aesthetics of the game — barring whatever Marvel vs. Capcom 2 was trying to do — even ripped design ideas from comics; the character select screen looked like panels straight from the page and the UI borrowed its bold look from comic lettering.

In comparison, Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite seems confused about what look it’s trying to pull off.

The game’s characters have an undefined and confused visual style. They don’t look like comic book characters. They don’t look like the Marvel Cinematic Universe either. They feel like uninspired 3D representations of beloved and recognizable characters. You might think you’re looking at a really polished mobile game, not a console title created in 2017.

Capcom

Dragon Ball FighterZ, on the other hand, takes its source material and tries its best to not only emulate it, but push it to its extreme.

Characters look faithful to our memories of them from the anime. Their attacks are visual spectacles that take over the screen just like they do on the show. And the moment-to-moment action is as intense as we’ve ever seen it. It’s bonkers, in a pleasant way.

Being faithful to the source material is essential when making fighting games about characters we often see in combat. To be fair, the fighting system in Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite feels as good as ever — from what we’ve played so far — but the fighting game community has made it loud and clear that its design is what needs work.

Dragon Ball FighterZ hits all its marks in trying to recreate the look and feel of the anime it’s based on. The gameplay and presentation of the game feel finely tuned to what we’d expect from a 2D Dragon Ball fighting game made in 2017. The gameplay is fast, the combos look devastating and the destruction the attacks cause, not only to opponents, but to the battlefields themselves, looks like it was ripped straight from the most intense scenes of the anime.

This perfect concert of design choices makes Dragon Ball FighterZ one of the most anticipated fighting game from fans of the genre at E3 this year.

We won’t see this game until early 2018, but the sentiment from the fighting game community has been mostly the same so far: it looks and plays great.

Fans of Marvel vs. Capcom fell in love with the series because of gameplay and visuals that strongly leveraged the unique mashup of its source material. The latest entry in the franchise seems to have taken a few missteps along the way.

And if Arc System Works can keep Dragon Ball FighterZ as polished as it looked on the show floor of E3 this year, fighting game fans might start asking, “When’s Dragon Ball?” at the next tournament.