Here is what I knew about Dragon Ball FighterZ before I played it at Bandai Namco's Paris expo last month: 1) developer Arc System Works is the seasoned creator of painterly, 2D beatdowns responsible for BlazBlue and Guilty Gear, 2) Dragon Ball is a venerable manga in which absurd hunks with radioactive mullets make planets explode by, as far as I can tell, experiencing really bad heartburn, 3) ???? 4) profit, going by ecstatic reactions to the closed beta. Now that I've laid hands on it, I can replace "????" with "FighterZ is quite an accessible fighting game, for all its multiple-decade backstory and arcane terminology". Fear not, dabbler - if like me you struggle to sort your Gokus from your Gohans and your Ultimate Z Changes from your Sparking Blasts, you can still make headway here by, in essence, doing quarter circles with your thumbs and sitting back as the TV catches fire.
Even by the genre's wildly theatrical standards, Dragon Ball FighterZ is over-the-top. Most super moves begin with a close-up of the character's abruptly 3D face, veins popping, teeth grinding as the raw stuff of kickass bubbles up from the palms of their hands. Every other combo ends with somebody being kicked through a megastructure in the backdrop, right into a different stage - beautifully idiotic transitions that interrupt the flow without throwing you off, inasmuch as everything that surrounds them is just as insane. When a fighter is KO'd, the next in your line-up doesn't merely hop on-screen but screeches out of the cloudy distance like the Starship Enterprise performing an emergency brake. Arc System's artists and animators are at the top of their class, and they've done an amazing job of capturing the colour and derangement of Dragon Ball's anime outings. If you're a fan of the franchise, the game is almost worth owning for its looks alone.
There's more to it than looks, of course. The fighting system beneath the fireworks is an unsurprising but very slick mixture of concepts from previous Arc games and the Marvel vs Capcom series - light, medium and strong attacks, a projectile or character-specific special attack, throws, dashes and a handy "vanish" teleport that makes it difficult to keep anybody at arm's length for long. Each player fields three combatants at once, summoning the off-characters to launch brief assists or switching between them to counter an opponent's mastery of a particular fighter.
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