Originally published April 2018

I have already mentioned my disappointment with the tutorial in my super-long review of the Dragon Ball FighterZ. I wanted to talk more about my issues with the tutorial, and why I found it so vexing. I also wanted to document some of the important tips and tricks that the tutorial doesn't bother to teach you. However, the review was getting too long, so I decided to split this off and do another lengthy exposé on Dragon Ball FighterZ and its flaws. Why? Because I really enjoy the game overall and I hope that they improve the tutorial in the future for new players. As of right now, however, the Dragon Ball FighterZ tutorial sucks.

Why Does It Suck?

Dragon Ball FighterZ, while a very approachable fighting game with its various auto-combos and smooth controls, is still a complicated game. First and foremost, it's a fighting game. Fighting games, with the exception of Divekick, are one of the more complicated genres of games. As a result, it's difficult for interested newcomers to really get into it and understand it enough to get over the learning curve. The Dragon Ball part of the equation was enough to get a lot of people interested in this game who wouldn't normally bat an eye at fighting games. So it's frustrating to me that the developers didn't put in the effort to retain as many new players as possible.

Arc's Previous Resources

What is really frustrating about it to me is that the game's developer, Arc System Works, used to really put in the effort for their tutorials. I know I mention it a lot in my Dragon Ball FighterZ review, but Blazblue Calamity Trigger and Continuum Shift are something of the personal standard for me when it comes to fighting game experiences. Blazblue (made by Arc Sys) was an incredibly complex fighting game and its sequels have continued as such. Put simply: they're not easy games to get into.

At the time of Blazblue's initial release, I had barely started to get into fighting games in a meaningful way. Blazblue was the first game that taught me mechanics and fundamentals in a way that made the fighting genre make sense. I started to understand why some moves would be unsafe in certain scenarios versus others. I started to realize what constituted a strong defense. I understood why some characters were stronger than others beyond the concept of "priority." How did I learn all this?

BlazBlue Calamity Trigger came with three useful learning tools. The first was the Blu-ray disc that came with the game if you bought it brand new. It came with some tips straight from the developers. These tips included information about each character's strengths and weaknesses, as well as some combo demonstrations. It was a good starting point, but if you didn't buy the game new, you might have missed out on this resource. That didn't matter in the long run, though, because there were still other learning tools available.

Blazblue also had its standard tutorial. As you might expect, Dragon Ball FighterZ has a standard tutorial as well, but the effort (or lack thereof) paid to the Dragon Ball FighterZ tutorial is abhorrent by comparison. In Blazblue's tutorial, specifically in Continuum Shift, one of the characters not only forced you to go through the usual motions of a tutorial but also explained certain benefits and detractors along the way. From basic to advanced techniques, Rachael guided you through the tutorial with important information about what you were doing and why you might do it a certain way. She pointed out details like how there were multiple methods of blocking attacks and why you would do one instead of the others. She also talked about more advanced techniques like move cancelling, or using Bursts offensively versus defensively.

When the Blazblue tutorial was complete, I had a better grasp of the mechanics of a game to which I was already familiar. I didn't just learn the different methods of moving back and forth across the screen; I learned why I would do it one way instead of another. The Dragon Ball FighterZ tutorial doesn't teach you that. It teaches you which buttons do certain things and barely talks about why you would or wouldn't use them. It tells you that Sparking Blast increases certain stats and that you heal damage, but it doesn't talk about how the burst itself can lead to more combos, nor does it tell you about how it changes certain properties of moves, like vanishing attacks or overhead strikes. Stuff like this can be discovered if you're paying attention, but it can also be extremely frustrating for a newcomer who loses a match because they did something they didn't know they could do and end up thinking it's a glitch.

A Wasted Challenge Mode

The third primary learning resource that came with Blazblue was the challenge mode. This is a standard for most 2D fighting games these days. It's simply a mode that has a set of various combo challenges for you to complete. It's something that is typically meant for you to physically learn the timing of combo attacks. It's also usually meant to give you an idea of how each character plays by providing a starting point. In each game, they usually start off rather simple and become much more advanced and damaging by the end. Most of the time, I'm not able to do all of them for a character simply because I'm not dedicated enough to learn the timing for every combo. However, I was able to do so in Dragon Ball FighterZ, and not because I've gotten better at fighting games.

The challenge mode in Dragon Ball FighterZ frustrates me because of how empty it is. Both Blazblue and DBF's challenge modes have 10 combo challenges for each character. However, the difference in difficulty and what you learn is immeasurable. One could simply cut the first 7 challenges of each character in DBF and put them in the general tutorial. As I mentioned in my review, the first 7 challenges for each character usually consist of the auto combos with some very basic, common attack strings that apply to almost every character. First of all, auto-combos do not belong in the challenge mode because of two reasons:

1. Everyone has auto-combos that behave the same way, so there's nothing to learn

2. There is no challenge in hitting the same button over and over again, so it isn't a "Challenge"

Just with the auto combos alone, you could eliminate 3 out of the 10 challenges for each character. Challenges 4-7 consist of you performing the special moves of the character that are outlined in the move list. Occasionally, there will be a slightly more advanced combo that involves using some common attack strings. Again, this should just be in the tutorial, especially when you consider that every character has the same motions for their special moves. There's no point in teaching us the same inputs over and over in the character-specific challenge mode.

It's only when you get to the 8th or 9th challenge that it finally starts to show combos more specific to the character. These are where you might actually learn some mechanics the game doesn't bother to teach you, such as bouncing characters off walls, or canceling your moves. Are the combos they teach you any good? Some are. Most, however, are not extremely efficient when it comes to the amount of effort required to pull them off in relation to the damage they cause. If you're familiar with fighting games, you might be able to glean some ideas from these last 3 challenges. If not, you may end up trying to use these instead of more effective, easier combos.

Why Do I Care that the Tutorial Sucks?

It is a shame that Dragon Ball FighterZ wastes so many opportunities to teach its players, especially when you consider that it is currently the game with the most registrations for EVO 2018, the annual massive fighting game championship. People like this game a lot and even more people would probably like it more if it didn't seem like such a huge barrier to get over in order to compete at even a basic level. If people understood the various mechanics of the game, it might not be so frustrating for newcomers to face more experienced players. It might even give them enough of a foundation to learn from their fights and get the true, meaningful fighting game experience of analyzing your strategies and learning from them.

It irritates me that the tutorial is bad because of the fact that I know more people would be interested in playing it if there wasn't such a barrier to entry. This irritation is compounded by my own personal frustrations of having to search for inputs for core mechanics on forums, rather than being able to find it in the game. If the tutorial were better, everyone would benefit. If more people played, then it probably wouldn't take 10-30 minutes of waiting to get matched up with somebody online. More people would be willing to learn and play online, making the match-making experience better. If the tutorial were better, I wouldn't have had to search several websites to learn how to tag in a super attack from an assist character using only one bar of meter, but we'll get to that next time.

I hold out hope that the game will tidy up some of the flaws I mentioned in the review over time: online matchmaking, tutorial system, user interface, etc. Even NetherRealm, despite their terrible interface for all the loot in their game, has been steadily making improvements and changes to Injustice 2 and just recently added a new tutorial system that goes into way more detail about the systems in place than you would expect. Hopefully, Arc System Works will do the same with Dragon Ball FighterZ.

Come back next week for some tips I've learned during my time with the game as well as from YouTube videos.

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