Although there’s been countless Dragon Ball games over the past nearly 40 years, many of us were able to take part in one of if not the best the storied manga / anime series had ever seen (at least for a time) in the fighting game community.
A new documentary just dropped from Tyrant covering the competitive history, reception and perception of Dragon Ball FighterZ from its meteoric launch to the strange state the game finds itself in now.
FighterZ quickly became the most important fighter of the last generation for its ability to build bridges across the FGC with all of the important players and scenes detailed from Kazunoko, CO|Go1 and SonicFox to Hikari and Wade.
Tyrant also goes through the game’s development and updates season by season and year by year to help show how DBFZ continued to evolve along with highlights from each world tour plus the characters that helped define them.
There hasn’t been a new DLC fighter since Lab Coat Android 21 released over two years ago already, which continued to push the game down the weird path it finds itself in today with how broken she was, but DBFZ is still technically being supported for the time being.
It’s also impossible to ignore the inexplicable announcement of rollback netcode after years of requests at Evo 2022 followed by the year and a half wait for it to release in a messed up state (despite having a strong beta showing).
The “upgraded” PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S versions released with their own issues on top of that including worse graphics and effects than the original, which is supposed to be updated sometime this month.
Dragon Ball FighterZ did not make the cut for Evo 2024 for the first time since it released, and without confirmation of another world tour, the competitive scene is currently very much up in the air though it technically remains one of the most played games in the genre after six years.
A lot can be said about the faults of DBFZ, but it’s important not to lose the impact of the light the game’s brought to the FGC as well in which you can find both in Tyrant’s new documentary below.