Dragon Ball FighterZ's competitive reliance on Lab Coat Android 21 and the Fused Saiyans is somehow even worse than last year

The Dragon Ball FighterZ World Tour Finals 2022/2023 are going down this weekend, giving the community a chance to see the best players from almost all corners of the globe face off in person once again as well as what characters they’re playing now.

Last year, the game’s community raised quite the stink about the overwhelming prevalence of Lab Coat Android 21 and the Saiyan fusions in tournaments, and somehow the issue appears to be even worse now.

Out of the 20 players competing in the group stage of the finals, 15 of them included Lab Coat 21 on their main teams.

We previously said we weren’t sure we’d ever seen a fighter reach 70% representation at an event before, but that puts her at 75% for this year’s finals, which is pretty astounding.

It should also come as little surprise at this point that Vegito, Super Saiyan Blue Gogeta and Super Saiyan 4 Gogeta are the most popular picks after DBFZ’s final DLC character, and their numbers are even higher than they were at last year’s World Tour Finals too.

In fact, even though there are more finalists than last year, the overall character representation is actually worse.

We’ve only seen 20 characters receive main team play for 20 competitors, which would be excellent in a 1v1 fighter, but you have to remember this is out of 60 potential characters in the field of play and represents less than half of FighterZ’s total roster.

We can’t blame the players for picking who they believe gives them the best chance to win the prize money and doesn’t mean these characters don’t take skill, but it feels kinda absurd that Super Smash Bros. Melee major events have had arguably better diversity lately.

Bandai Namco hasn’t released a new balance update since they nerfed Lab Coat 21 in June 2022, and they said that was to be the final adjustments DBFZ would receive.

It may be wise of them to perhaps rethink that strategy when they’re planning to release the next generation versions of FighterZ soon with rollback netcode, which might be a pretty tough sell if people feel the game is just figured out and dominated by like 4 characters out of 40+.

This doesn’t mean we can’t still have fun with the high-level action going on this weekend, but just be prepared to see mostly Lab Coats, Vegitos and Gogetas running around with some Janembas and a few others rounding out the cast.

You can check out the full breakdown of character usage for the DBFZ World Tour Finals group stage below.