The Chillest Folks I Know Are FighterZ

Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name (as well as the WEAKNESSES of your SECRET MARTIAL ARTS TECHNIQUES.)

Dragon Ball FighterZ came out this past Friday, which has led a lot of folks to once again hang out with an old friend from their childhood. Particularly, the one friend that yelled a lot and exploded things with beam attacks. My short review is that it's extremely good, the sort of thing that comes out of a project that is very much a work of fans, but fans that can curb their own enthusiasm enough to do what a property needs to do, and not try to make it do what they want it to. In this case, it's a low stress, colourful, escapist noise machine for casual players that moves and punches like it should, and pretty much the most competition-ready fighting game Dragon Ball has ever had for the more involved fightgame fans. This was achieved by the capable folks at Arc System Works (Arcsys), the folks who started out with the goal of making fighting games purpose built from the ground up for home consoles, and wound up basically inventing the anime fighter through that.

And of course, shout outs to the Funimation voice cast, because they basically made the story mode into a similar kung fu sorta-Futurama the English dub has become known for as it's matured into its own identity.

Look, you said it, man, I didn't.

One of the most endearing parts of actually playing FighterZ is one I absolutely wasn't expecting, though, and that's the game's main menu. Beyond the requisite start screen with the main game options, pretty much any flat menu navigation is optional- it's still there if you want it, and it's handy if you want to just play. But the charm lies from the fact that once you're logged into the servers or an offline lobby, the shape the game's features take are spread out across a tiny little world, with you as one inhabitant of it. Each of the game's many modes are little attendants running kiosks set up around the environments.

Your complimentary brochure to the amenities of COMBATVILLE.

I could go on about stuff about how player involvement is important, about buzzwordy things like 'Engagement' that probably sound awesome to a capitalist. Me, I just think it's charming.

Does this bus go up town? Wait, I can fly. Also wait, do I do anything for a living? I mean, aside raise my rival's kids?

There is potential in such a system for massive and utter failure. For one, the idea of logging into a game and immediately being confronted with text chat or, worse, VOIP from the internet's loneliest shitheels until you pile into an offline lobby and seal the blast doors behind you is quick to come to mind, and also, awful. FighterZ is smarter than this, instead choosing to expand on the preset chat commands from the earlier Xenoverse games. Nothing to communicate with other players via text, other than a list of basically everything you need to talk to strangers in game- hellos, thank yous, wanna plays? That sort of thing. Whereas Xenoverse had emote animations you could use with your created character, the tiny Dragon Ball characters you use in avatars in this menu/game world gestalt instead emit stickers, which are either coloured art from the comics, cut outs from frames of the shows, or promo art from elsewhere. These stickers include this incredibly smug Bulma, which I use probably more than I should:

If you thought of Krumping Marge looking at this, you're not alone.

The concept of games that aren't just things you play, but things you can socialize in, are a thing I've had on my mind a lot as of late. That a game can facilitate an atmosphere that is welcoming, and then have the inoculation against jerks that comes from putting a leash on the ways malicious strangers have of running up to you and disgorging their filth into your experience? It's a thing I can get behind. Similar to how first Blizzard's Hearthstone did it with a simple set of preset chat macros, and then Direwolf Digital picked up their ball and ran with it when they made unlockable, faction-based chat macros for their own excellent online card game Eternal, this simple, dev-controlled limitation imposed solves two problems. The first is that it allows players to communicate beyond the limitations of what languages they speak, with the game's own individual language localizations handling the heavy lifting of translating the chat, allowing people to connect all over the world and actually be understood one to one.

The second is that it largely renders people who think their right to be jackasses to strangers over an online entertainment service is included with purchase are rendered as largely impotent as they are in real life. You have to be creative to bother random people in a system like this, and creativity isn't really a strong suit in the average mediocre adult child on the internet.

Listen, I heard there was going to be some sort of white people malarkey about "free speech" happening over here, and I decided to stop by and share a word. That word is "hellzone grenade." Well, seeya.

That this little menu world seems specifically built with room to roam around and set up your own little spot to run a group game adds to the welcoming atmosphere. It's a weird little thing that didn't need to be done, and yet it completely makes the experience. It gives that extra little tingle of feeling that games these days are things that are a lot more living than they used to be. It's not really something you can get looking at a refreshing list of open lobbies and online friends. Sure, it helps that those lists are still there, because those are handy to have too. But I felt more like I was actually doing a thing with people, rather than just wasting time online. And it's a place where you don't have to worry about whatever vileness the online world's anonymous creeps want to spring on you. It's a place where people come to play a game where people shoot punch lasers at each other, and that's what happens; nobody gets called a slur in the lobby over VOIP, nobody acts weird around the person wearing an Android 18 avatar, asking if they're "actually female." It's as simple as making it so that the only option a stranger has is to choose from a preset list of options written by someone that was housebroken. If people want to voice chat, they'll connect elsewhere and make friends. What FighterZ does? It's functional, and it works exactly as far as it needs to, giving an experience that feels alive, without as much wiggle room as all the merry scumbags typically have to abuse.

And of course, that the game moves like this when you're actually fighting also helps matters.

Tell me how many episodes that took to pop off.