Gameplay Journal #2: Dragon Ball FighterZ

It’s no secret that I love the Dragon Ball series. It’s also no secret that I love fighting games. When you combine these two things, the results can vary. Dragon Ball is no stranger to the fighting game genre; a lot of the video game adaptations for the series are fighting games, albeit more causal friendly, appealing to fans first and the hardcore fighting game fans last. Don’t get me wrong, I still loved those games as a kid. Budokai 3 for the PlayStation 2 still remains as my favorite Dragon Ball game from that generation but all these previous attempts were missing a key ingredient: a truly competent fighting game developer. As I grew older and started to play fighting games more competitively than casually, I’ve longed for a competitive Dragon Ball fighting game made by a competent developer like Capcom. There was an attempt to make such a game back in 2005 with Super Dragon Ball Z for the PlayStation 2 (hell, they even got Noritaka Funamizu to work on this game who was a former producer of the Street Fighter series) but it’s convoluted controls which were clearly made for an arcade stick do not feel all that well on a Dualshock 2 controller. My wish for a real competitive Dragon Ball fighter was nothing but a mere dream…. until E3 2017. Bandai Namco, the current owners of the Dragon Ball video game publishing license, announced a 3v3 tag fighter named Dragon Ball FighterZ. It was going to be developed by Arc System Works, the studio responsible for the highly acclaimed anime fighting game series Guilty Gear. My wish has finally come true!

I have been playing Dragon Ball FighterZ since launch and my love for this game still continues to grow (despite the flaws regarding it’s online netcode), it’s literally my dream game. For this week’s Journal Entry, I played the game for just about an hour with my friend on the PC version, a version of the game that I recently bought out of the blue just because. Apart from it’s Marvel vs Capcom inspired mechanics, the art style is what keeps me coming back to this game. Arc Sys used Unreal Engine 4 to create DBFZ and it still shocks me to this day how beautiful this game still is after 3 years. The game is played on 2D plane, but characters are created and designed in 3D even though they appear as 2D sprites, even down to the lighting. They do this to create the specific imperfections of hand drawn animation as seen in anime.

Arc System Works is no stranger to Unreal Engine. They’ve used the engine for the first time with Guilty Gear Xrd -SIGN- back in 2015 and uses the same rendering techniques Dragon Ball FighterZ uses to create the “2D-but-not-really-2D” 3D look. The Unreal Engine is definitely re-usable given with this example. It’s a super popular engine that a lot of game developers use for their projects and it’s extensibility in the modding scene is enormous, especially with Dragon Ball FighterZ. Players can mod in their own versions of their highly requested characters such as Turles from Tree of Might and Tapion from Wrath of the Dragon who is a character I want to be in the real game really really bad. Modding is a hobby that dates back to the days of the original Wolfenstein when players figured out how to hack the engine to add in odd characters such as Barney the Dinosaur to which Henry Lowood explains that it documented “players’ eagerness to change content, even though the game did not offer an easy way to do this” (Game Engine, page 5). Modding today has become a huge scene where players can literally add anything to characters from other intellectual properties or custom made inventory for your game character to tweaking the game engine to learn how it functions. Some engines that are popular for modding are Unreal Engine (Epic Games), RE Engine (Capcom), and most notably the Creation Engine (Bethesda Game Studios). Henry Lowood said it best, “These alterations might result in the expression of personal gameplay preferences, artistic statements, [and] independent game production...” (Game Engine, page 5).

For this week’s Let’s Play video, I chose a video from one of my favorite content creators on YouTube / Twitch, Maximillian Dood.