Dragon Ball FighterZ (PS4): It's FighterZ, Not Fighter-Zee. Also, Holy SHIT.

If I can get all anime hipster for a second? Dragon Ball Z fans can go SCREW. I had to wake up at 5am on a sunday mornings so I could watch the original Dragon Ball series and Dragon Ball Z. I WAS COMMITTED YOU LAZY PRICKS. Unfortunately for me I started to lose steam on the series not long after it got its big push on Toonami in the late 90's when the series really started to build a head of steam. Sorry, when the Namek saga ran like 400 episodes, I decided that was enough time I could devote to it. I pretty much lived devoid of Dragon Ball since.

But you know what I love? Fighting games created by Arc Systems. Specifically the Guilty Gear, BlazBlue, and the Persona Arena series. I know people live and die by Street Fighter but the speed and intensity of Arc Systems just always feel so much better to me. So when one E3 showed off an over the top Arc Systems variant to Marvel vs Capcom I literally started salivating at the pairing with this anime series. It was a natural fit, and so started months upon months of chomping at the bit for.....

DRAGON BALL FIGTHERZ (PS4)

So I am super out of date on my Dragon Ball timeline so I'll explain the story as best I can. Sometime after/during the events of Dragon Ball Super the world has basically become overrun with with clones of the Z warriors and some of their notable villains. The problem is most of the Z warriors have gone missing, so Bulma goes to find Goku to try to take the fight to the clones and stop this invasion.

The problem is, Goku isn't actually Goku. Oh sure, he's still him but he has been severely depowered. There are a series of waves being pulsed out that are weakening everyone, and the only way to counteract it is link with a separate soul. A separate soul that happens to be currently controlling Goku. The soul is actually you as the player, so the characters are talking directly to you. While its not ideal, it does allow Goku to fight back against the clones. So first things first: Go find the other Z warriors, then once assembled go find the source of the waves and put a stop to this attack.

This story glosses over a lot, because they actually do something pretty interesting with the story. There are essentially 3 story mode arcs for you to play through: A heroes arc, a villains arc, and an Androids arc. The story basically functions the same way among all three modes: you get placed on a map with set enemies to fight. As you play through, you unlock story events depending on the team you are using. You also have set story events based on the boss of that set map, or characters you rescue. On top of this the more you use characters, the more they will interact with you to give them more of their inner monologue about the situation.

Although they use the term Arc, that isn't actually accurate because each Arc doesn't continue off of the last one. The levels you've earned remain, but instead of the story continuing you actually are playing an alternate timeline situation. Basically how things would have happened if you controlled the different set of characters and how that might have changed things.

It's only after you complete all three Arcs you receive the final true ending of the game and unlock FighterZ only original character: Android 21. She is basically a combination of one of the android characters and a Buu style character. And SHE, IS, DELIGHTFUL. Something about her voice and the almost innocent evil she exudes when threatening characters. She's tricky to use but an absolute joy and god do I hope she becomes canon to the series.

I. LOVE. HER.

God I haven't even talked about the gameplay yet. So as I mentioned before, FighterZ comes from the minds over at Arc Systems. When I saw the initial trailer of the game, it really looked like Arc was trying to doing their own take on the Marvel Vs. Capcom 3-vs-3 series using Dragon Ball as the setting, and I will be damned if that's pretty much exactly what I got. But what they really wanted to emphasize was a much less complicated barrier to entry, which has been a long standing complaint to those new to the Guilty Gear or BlazBlue franchise.

It operates on a pretty standard fighting game control scheme with light, medium, heavy attack, and a ki blast mapped to the 4 buttons. Your right shoulder buttons allow for two forms of rush called your Hyper dash (which allows you to fly across the screen to start or pursue a combo) and your Meteor rush (which is essentially a guard breaking combo launcher). Lastly your left shoulder buttons are mapped to your tag partners for quick assists to extend combos, or tagging them to take your current fighters place.

Whole lotta Goku Black in high level FighterZ play.

There are lots of little mechanics that blend these various games together as well. Like Marvel vs Capcom, characters that are tagged out will slowly recover some of their lost health. They appeared to fuse the Guilty Gear Burst effect with MVC's X-factor called the Sparking Blast, which will knock back your enemies and give you a temporary increase to power and health recovery for one last ditch effort to keep fighting,which increases the fewer teammates you have left. You are able to use your meteor rush to break a guard and force opponents to tag out and so forth.

There are also a lot of little mechanics in this game to make it easier to play. For example, in using just the light attack button you can automatically string together a short combo that will launch, follow, and complete with a slam back down. Persona 4 Arena (another Arc fighter) did something similar to this. If using the medium attack button you will string a stronger combo that ends with a flashy special move. Every character has a universal anti-air by hitting down and heavy. And generally, all of the special moves are pretty simplified as well as the majority of every character's move set can be done with the standard Hadoken motion (quarter circle, 2-3-6/2-1-4, d-dr-r or whatever scheme you subscribe to).

Then you have a bunch of little mechanics unique to the game. On top of the Sparking Blast, you can tap two buttons to instantly teleport behind an enemy for a heavy kick to close the gap quickly, or use to keep a combo airborne. When completing auto-combos or combos over 10 hits, you basically earn dragon balls. If you collect all 7, the player that hits an autocombo with a fully charged gauge can be granted a wish such as revive teammate, recover health, more power, etc.

In the story mode, there is also an additional stat boosting mechanic where you can give your characters various attribute changes to accommodate for the increasing difficulty of the enemies, but it won't be until your second playthrough or so where the enemy levels will force you to be very strategic about what attributes you need to give yourself. I basically would ride with increased experience and post match recovery to hang with teams I wanted to level longer.

Now, despite what the fighting game community and game developers would have me to believe, having just an online VS mode does not push me to buy a game. Street Fighter V tried to get away with this garbage, and that's why that game eats shit. So I will be holding it up on its single player experience because other people suck and I am not good enough to have an enjoyable match with the frothing, quick twitch, rage quitting jerks who pollute online fighters.

In crazier moments, it really does just become an episode of DBZ

So as I stated before the game has a Story mode, which is fine but after you complete it there is little reason to keep playing it other than increasing difficulty and stat customization. It has an arcade mode which has an interesting scaling mechanic for the difficulty, so if you are blowing the the first matches too easily you will be scaled upwards to increasingly more difficult matches. If you lose or have a hard time, you keep level or move back down. It makes getting an S-rank run in arcade a bit more tougher than it appears. There is also an 2nd tier of difficulty which increases all of the matches.  This is the mode I most frequently play.

There is a pretty comprehensive tutorial on how to play the game, and the first run of the story mode is going to basically be vomiting tutorial at you for a significant portion of the story. It got to the point where I realized like some 4 hours into the game I was still getting tutorial, but the story was actually really good so it wasn't bothering me like it normally would have. The training mode also has a combo trainer, which was not actually as difficult to go through as some of these combo trainers usually are in these games. Usually with like Street Fighter or Tekken I would get about halfway through and be like "fuck it, I can't get this frame perfect timing."

FighterZ also as a recording replay feature that I have never used, mainly because I am not impressive with this game. This is mainly used to supplement the multitude of online modes the game features. Once you are placed in a lobby for multiplayer, you can open a ring to fight other people present in the lobby (up to 8 people), or wait in line for your turn to go at someone. You have have two matches going at a time but for some strange reason, people waiting don't get to spectate the match. I have no idea why they would do this since being able to watch would keep people in the ring.

There is also an Arena battle mode, which also features the lobby you play in but I don't think there is a player restriction on this one. I actually haven't played an arena battle. There is also the World Stage mode, which is where you can queue up to Ranked and Unranked matches worldwide. Whats nice about this is your queue can hold if you are playing the arcade, training, or story modes. There is an offline vs mode as well for local play.

This is seriously some GO1 (go-ichi) level defense.

Everything about this game is pretty fuckin' great because its basically aping off of the incredibly solid Guilty Gear Xrd iterations in the unreal engine: using 3d models shaped in a way to give it a 2d look which allows for interesting camera tricks and dramatic angles. Animations are high intensity, fast, and fluid as every good fighting game should be. It translates well to the story mode cut-scenes as well and is simply gorgeous.

Surprisingly to me, Guilty Gear luminary Daisuke Ishiwatari outside of a little casual advice thrown in, had practically nothing to do with the production of the game despite it using a similar engine. And like many of the other Arc System fighting games, I would have thought he did the soundtrack because it has that same high energy rock his games are known for. Hell the FighterZ is basically a copy of what they did in Guilty Gear Xrd.

It even shows a lot of appreciation to the source material, as every characters moves and specials are faithfully recreated in the game so they look like they fight the same way they did in your favorite episodes. Even more so, if you use the right characters in the right stage settings, you can trigger cinematics that re-create some of the more famous moments of the show (such as beating Frieza with Goku on Destroyed Namek).

Yamcha is one of the few who got an original Dramatic Finish. Finishing
his fight with Nappa LIKE IT SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED.

But if I did have to criticize some things, I would say the online play is a chore to set up and there is not a lot of punishment for rage quitters. I feel the game has some serious balancing issues because the casual players basically spam the hyperdash relentlessly because there is little way to punish it after it connects. Usually everyone universal anti-air will counter it but you still have to time it right and that's not exactly easy to do. So unless you get that trick down, expect to have that dash in your face a lot.

And since this is in that MvC kinda vein, combos can get long and stretched out. This game rewards offense more than defense (despite the best in the world right now being a primarily defensive player). So once you are tagged with a combo you are basically relegated to stay in it until the opponent drops it or finishes it. I don't know why the Sparking Blast in this game couldn't count as one free combo break like Guilty Gear's Burst does. That'd be a small concession to give a player one free fighting chance. So any time you think are you are ready to tackle some online play, please be warned that you are probably not.

One of the easiest jokes in the series.

Lastly my ongoing crusade against the DLC. I've clearly lost this battle. There is a 35 dollar "Fighter Pass" that was released with the game with a schedule of no less than 8 DLC characters to come out by the end of the summer. And at this point I just said "Fuck it, fine. Here." and paid for the thing when the first 2 additional characters came out. I've lost. Retail games aren't 60 dollars anymore. They are 90 going on infinity because we as gamers needed to say as a whole "We aren't going to let you nickle and dime every aspect of the game." and we didn't. We let the EA, Biowares, and Capcoms of the world win and get away with this, and now its just something that is accepted. This blows. Fuck DLC.

But complaints not withstanding, Dragon Ball: FighterZ after a somewhat rocky beta basically fucking nailed it on this one.  I don't know if this has supplanted Guilty Gear as my favorite fighting game series but I really feel it is making a hell of a case for it. I play this game constantly and have been practicing to play it in my first EVO championship trip. It's hands down one of the best fighting games in the market right now and its easy to see why its already so immensely popular. It's fast paced and frenetic, easy to pick up but skillful. And if that's what you look for in a fighter you can't go wrong with Dragon Ball: FighterZ.

The first nerfs came out, too
Arc dared to disappoint Vegeta.

Watch Dogs: "Hack" might be a bit strong, but....

The hype machine is a dangerous mistress to have in the world of gaming and she is no greater personification of the double edged sword. Take something like Dead Island which had an absolutely phenomenally done trailer.  It generated a ton of hype and when it came out, it sucked. Because of this, I try to be more wary around hype.

But some people hype right.  This game was unveiled the right way by showing off like 15 minutes of completely uninterrupted game footage, showing you all the cool innovative tricks you could do. It was cleverly done and made me very excited to get my PS4. But sadly it was pushed back like 6 months. Finally it has come out and now I finally get to see if the hype was well deserved when I sit down with....

WATCH DOGS

Our story takes place in a semi-futuristic incarnation of Chicago. The entire city and its inhabitants are wirelessly a part an online data service called ctOS which allows everything to be controlled smoothly via electronics and smartphones. However, this makes it a primary target for the hacker community, hackers such as Damien Brenks and our protagonist Aiden Pearce.

In the prologue, Aiden is at a fancy shindig at a classy hotel known as the Merlaut. He wanders in as hacks into the ctOS there to give access to Damien, who beings to hack through the personalities at the hotel and siphon out their financials for a very hefty load. But they catch the traces of another hacker. Aiden motions to leave but Damien wants to explore the intruder, which results in them tripping the alarms and sending the police in pursuit. Aiden narrowly evades capture.

But the second hacker was able to find their identities and the fixers (a freelance mercenary group), are issued a contract to kill Aiden. The gunman sides up on Aiden while he's driving with his niece and nephew and shoots out the tires, causing the car to flip and kills Aiden's niece, Lena. 11 months later, Aiden has taken to vigilantism, attacking those who use the system to cheat people all the while trying to find the person who took his niece from him. He's got a lead, he's on the move, and this is where we pick up.

Aiden mourns with his Sister (but takes it harder as he feels its his fault)

What made the E3 showing of this game so fuckin cool is that it showcases how integral hacking was to the game. You were in a crowded club and it showed you how you manipulate your surroundings via hacks. When you exited it showed that the police were incoming and you were able to hack the surrounding traffic lights to have them crash and evade capture. Very cool, and that got a lot of people excited.

However as the showing continued the play started involving a bit of parkouring, and gun combat. I should have taken it as a warning sign but whatever, lots of games use guns. And that had never been a deterrent for me before. So that shouldn't have been anything to worry about, so I didn't work about it.

But then the record breaking Grand Theft Auto V came out and basically killed in all the reviews, sales, and awards. Watch Dogs precariously got pushed back to May even though supposed to be a next gen launch title. THAT was the red flag I should have heeded. That was where I should have realized this game is hiding something. Now I know this paints a pretty negative light, and I haven't even started reviewing the game yet. So let me get into that and all will be explained.

At its face value, Watch Dogs is a semi futuristic sandbox title. Still for the most part firmly rooted in the present but just far enough for the premise to have a completely networked city in the US. It plays exactly as you would expect a sandbox game to play, right down to the fairly similar controls. I'm sure the folks at Ubisoft hate the comparison, but if you played Grand Theft Auto V then a lot of the controls will feel familiar to you.

It always comes back to guns... Sigh.

There is a bit of weirdness in when you press up on the dpad you bring up your phone menu much like GTAV, but unlike it, you can't use the dpad to navigate it once its open. You have you use the right analog stick and I have to tell you that doesn't feel natural to me. Its from this menu you can order specific vehicles or upgrade your abilities, check online rankings, and so on. I would think it was more integral to the game but if I wasn't boosting my abilities I rarely went in here.

The on foot controls are smooth and intuitive. When holding R2/T you break into a free run and if you hold down O/B you fly over obstacles or parkour up walls with ease. When you are in pursuit of someone and you get within a certain range, Aiden will fly at them with a very aggressive takedown. That plays smooth and feels good when you do it. You can tell it has an Assassin's Creed feel to the way you fly around or on surrounding environments. And when you are stealthing around or getting into a fire fight, it is very easy and fast to slip in and out of cover.

I'm not a fan of much cover based shooting, but for stealth the cover mechanic is seamless.

Unfortunately, and this was probably my biggest issue with the game, is that the driving sucks an entire satchel of diseased boners. There is GTA IV driving, which is a tad too realistic for my taste. There is GTAV or Saints Row driving, which is a bit arcadey but fast and fun to play. But now we have Watch Dogs where it feels like you are trying to drive a formula one car over a frozen lake.

My first few missions that required driving turned into an unmitigated disaster. If I had to akin the driving to something, I would say that every single 4 wheel vehicle in the game operates like you were driving a fork lift. Every time you go to adjust your car or take a turn, It feels like the back of the car moves into place before the front of the car does. Maybe its the swing of the camera angle, but it was incredibly disorienting and it usually resulted in me smacking into every single other car like a pinball stuck between the bumpers. No matter how nice or how fast my car was when I first sat into the thing, I would be parking a twisted, smoking (and occasionally burning) heap of scrap metal.

Unlocking the steam pipe hack basically ruins pursuits and convoys.

Thankfully, although equally wonky, I found the motorcycle controls to be much more forgiving and easier to handle. So like most sandbox games before it, the cycle quickly became my vehicle of choice. For pretty much the duration of the game. I did eventually get the hang of driving these cars, but not till close to the end of the game and even then I avoided them unless I was evading pursuers and needed a desperate lift.

I'm torn on the shooting controls. Switching between your guns is fairly easy, hitting L1 brings up my menu and I can quickly scroll through 4 weapon slots giving me access to the all the weapons I own, so that is definitely a plus. I can also access all my various hack items (which I'll get into later) which I can also scroll through with relative ease. Moving from cover to cover as mentioned before is pretty smooth and intuitive. Its not the lock on assisted aim that GTA V had and I wasn't really expecting it to be, overall the shooting works well.

What I don't like about it though is the bizarre strengths of weapons. The it feels like when I pecking at people with an AK-47, it takes way more rounds than it should to put people down. When firing with a silenced pistol if I tag a head shot they drop like a rock, that makes sense. If I hit them in the body, it takes 3-5 rounds. OK, seems like a few but I can follow it. When I'm near point blank rank and I've unloaded 10 rounds of a fully automatic shotgun? OK, now our balancing issues are off. A fully auto shotgun should lay waste to absolutely anything that walks in front of it, no matter where it hits on the body. Ubi fucked that up as far as I'm concerned.

But I think the reasoning behind that possibly is the games big draw is the ability to hack, and using said ability to get out of hairier situations. For example, in a number of missions you will have to sneak your way (or assisting someone else in sneaking) into an area and there will usually be a number of fairly heavily armed patrols around impeding your progress. To sneak by them, you need to slink around cover, hack nearby things to draw their attention away from you, or in worst case scenarios fling out these little noise makers that will pull their attention to them so you can sneak by.

The guided stealth is actually pretty cool. You manipulate your surroundings
to kill baddies and help your target escape. Sometimes frustrating though.

The problem is, if one fucking person sees you and you don't take them out in the milliseconds of being caught? They will open fire, which results in the other people being alerted, which results in them opening fire, which leaves you pinned down with about 30 billion bullets raining down on you till one of them flings a grenade at you. Even with pretty stacked weaponry the odds are usually against you in a fire fight and ever worse there doesn't seem to be a very easy way to escape them. And boy does it let you know because you will be gunned down in this game, A LOT.

The key is to use your skills properly. Having a silenced pistol helps, you can trigger a car alarm or a retractable barrier to get some dopey guard to walk towards it, use your focus boost ability (IE: Slow time) to line up a shot, and pop an easy head shot. If another guy sees the body chances are they will go over to investigate allowing you to tag another one. Or, you can fling one of your noise makers near a steam pipe or transformer, then blow the thing up as they walk by. If things start to go tits up, you also have a tool that will black out the city for a few seconds, which is the god tier of your hacks in my book. Using hacks to take out patrols was easily the best aspect of the game for me.

Since this isn't GTA you can't open fire or throw bombs from your car, which makes the chases a bit more difficult, but not terribly much because you still have access to your hacks. Most of the time you can change traffic lights with a short quick time event, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But once you are able to burst steam pipes while you drive, chases because laughably easy because you can take out one or two cars at a time easily. If any stragglers follow you can block them with road posts or another light. 

But it has some very bizarre car camera angles as well, which makes it incredible difficult in some lights. For example, you earn a hack that allows you to disrupt a chopper in pursuit. But the camera never seems to swing enough for the camera to see it so you can use your ability, so the recourse is to stop your car mid chase so the stupid chopper can get ahead of you. It's ridiculous.

I think one of the biggest problems of the game is the sandbox tends to bombard you with side missions and they are kind of distracting. If you are keeping to the actual story, then fine, its pretty easy to follow along with. But say you are moving to the next story point, you will get this messages that appear in your HUD that notify you that a crime is about to take place, or that you unlocked a side mission to perform, or that somebody is hacking into your game.

Oooooohh.. Let me rant about this shit for a bit. OK, pervasive online? FUCKING stop with it. I understand online multiplayer is kind of a big deal right now, but you know what? Not everybody wants to fucking do it. Some people (such as myself) want to sit down with their game and play the story and enjoy the game for what it is. So when an alert pops up and says "HEY, This asshole is hacking into your game and stealing your money. You better find him in the crowded area really fast!" and then I end up not doing that, and I get penalized for it. Fuck you. I didn't ask him to be in my game, and I didn't want him there. Thank you random fuckwit for ruining my game experience for me.

I was OK with this in Demon's Souls and Dark Souls because this is was a relatively new idea. But ultimately, if I didn't want to deal with it, there were ways to avoid it. But in Dark Souls 2 the only way to avoid it was to play offline. Which is bullshit because I still wanted to be able to summon help, you assholes. Now with Watch Dogs and this past E3 it seems like more and more devs want to build games that force you to play with other people. You can piss right off, I don't like other people, and I don't want to play with them if I don't have to. So quit trying to force me.

I am the king of keeping a low profile. 

Something I recently discovered that is stupid with this game is that it only has one save slot. If you start a new game it erases your old game. I hope that some day we will eventually have video game consoles that have a large amount of memory for multiple saves. A hard drive of sorts perhaps. But alas, sadly humans haven't developed such mind bending space technology that only lives in fantasies, but its fun to dream. Seriously, fuck you Ubisoft. I've got 500 gigs of space, a 2nd save slot couldn't be that hard.

What bothers me the most about the game is that overall it has some really original ideas, but ultimately bobbles the execution by focusing on the shit I've already done in a billion other games. Yeah stealth and 3rd person shooting is fun and all, but there are like 30 other games I could probably go to a gamestop and get right now and get Stealth and 3rd person shooting. And its not like the hacking isn't core to the gameplay, it just seemed a lot more optional than it should have been to really drive this title home. Should have involved different ways to hack and more missions centralized around using them. Instead nearly every side mission is drive somewhere really fast, beat up this guy, or shoot these guys. Yawn.

Why is it when devs think of adding hacking in a game, its just Pipe Dream?
is there seriously no other minigame variant we can use to simulate hacking?

Even the story tends to bobble horribly. Its like a mix of Batman mixed with Assassin's Creed mixed with Grand Theft Auto mixed with Hitman and then poured over what could have been a good idea. Aiden is a gravely voiced protagonist who narrates to himself in a way that never seems to flow naturally. The whole premise and tone reeks of The Dark Knight (especially the final monologue), and I'm told there are similarities to the female character to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Its staggering to me how a game with such an original concept feel so unoriginal the whole way through it.

And really, a large portion of the story just doesn't really feel like it goes anywhere. I keep moving from story mission to story mission, but a good portion of the characters don't feel like they have any connection to the overall goal of the game, and their tie-in with Aiden seems token at best. I mean yes it all does connect by the end of it but I never really had that eureka "oh shit!" moment of the game. Just a "oh, its that guy. Ok then. What now?" kind of feeling.

Clara falls under a bit of a predictable trope, but I liked her as a character.

I find myself thinking about Remember Me as I played through this game. It was a game that had some really cool ideas and concepts, but then spent all they time focusing on everything else instead of what made it original. That's what Watch Dogs has done here. The game is playable, and if you can stay focused on the story, its not awful. But given all the hype that came into this game they dropped the ball badly. If this gets a sequel it could be an opportunity that this concept can work and with the right tweaking could be something really innovative. But the bottom line is it just isn't there yet and that is really disappointing.

Of course, this review isn't going to stop anyone from buying the game. Hell, PS4 has sold nearly 1.8 million copies and 3.75 million copies across all platforms according to vgchartz.com. But if you haven't bought it yet, I suggest going for it used, redbox it, or borrow it from a friend. It's pretty average across the board and I couldn't blame you if you skipped this one. I played Grand Theft Auto V again before this and that was still fresh and better than this was. Aside from the hacking, everything it brings to the table has been done better elsewhere. Hope you are happy, hype machine. You got me again.

Seriously though, its a game about Batman without Batman in it.