Every other match I've played has been consistently "playable" but there was always a delay that affected performance - and this includes the dozens of other people in the green as well. I can count the amount of matches on one hand that were as fast and seamless as fighting CPUs and it didn't have to do with the signal strength of the opponent (or mine), granted the opponents I've faced were in the green (connection-wise). On that measure, it has succeeded, and with style.The performance in this game is all over the place. Their mission was to make a fighting game that was true to its licence, and appealed both to anime-loving beginners and genre veterans. But this is a genre-wide problem, and one Arc and Bandai Namco never set out to solve.
There’s disappointment, too, in the lack of any kind of bridge between the easy button mashing of the Story modes and the lofty complexity of the high-level game. But it shouldn’t have happened in the first place. No doubt it will be fixed-these things usually are, and perhaps Namco were caught on the hop by the game’s success (it is already the most popular fighting game in Steam's history). If only the online component had launched in a slightly better state: network conditions are spotty at best, and you’ll frequently be kicked out of the online lobbies you’re automatically loaded in to when you boot up the game (yes, even if you want to play single-player modes). The game does a wonderful job of easing you in, but a pasting, whether you venture online or not, is as good as inevitable. The CPU AI suddenly turns into a monster with a few dozen tournament wins under its belt, while the online competition is stiff indeed. The moves may be easy, but working them into a team of three, finding synergy in assists and supers, is anything but. As you’ll discover once you clear the generous, if insultingly easy, Story mode, and either take on the upper tiers of Arcade mode or head online, this is a game of tremendous complexity. If your impression of all this is one of a game aimed at, and solely at, people who wouldn’t know a super cancel if it smacked them in the face, think again. Other system-wide concessions include auto-combos, performed with rapid presses of light or medium attack (the former including a flashy air combo, the latter ending in a super move) a Super Dash, which homes in on your opponent from anywhere on screen and the Vanish, which teleports you behind your opponent and whacks them away. They’re universal across the cast, too-each motion will produce a different result in each character, but the idea is that you can hop around the cast at will without needing to pore over pause-menu move lists. The same applies to super moves, albeit with either a double-button press or, on a controller, a single trigger.
Special moves are performed with simple quarter circles and one button. Mindful of the fact that the Dragon Ball licence will bring in a more casual audience than their games typically attract, Arc have lowered the barrier to entry with a host of systems aimed at the beginner player. But rarely has such devastation been so easy to pull off. Such visual spectacle isn’t exactly uncommon in fighting games, and particularly in team-based brawlers.