Last night, Bandai Namco had an all Dragon Ball-focused stream focusing on Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 and Dragon Ball FighterZ, but fans of both games left disappointed afterward.
For our purposes, we will focus on what little news was revealed on the future of FighterZ, as the game has been in the dark for quite some time. The 2019 Dragon Ball FighterZ World Tour was announced, with seven locations across the globe. It starts at CEO in Daytona, Florida on Jun. 29.
What most people were hoping for — news on season 2 of Dragon Ball FighterZ — sadly did not come. While it was confirmed to exist by producer Tomoko Hiroki, no information beyond that was given, and players were told to wait until the finals of the 2018 Dragon Ball FighterZ World Tour happening on Jan. 27, along with some “special” surprises. It was also mentioned that gameplay and system changes are going to be implemented. To what extent we do not know, but it is good to know that changes are in store. It was a bit worrying to hear mentioned that it was noticed by the development staff how hard comebacks were to achieve within the game. While this is definitely true, we can only hope some sort of new comeback mechanic isn’t introduced that will throw the game off its balance. Dragon Ball FighterZ only needs a few minor changes to make drastic overall improvement to the gameplay after all.
The team said EVO was a learning experience, and we can only hope the right lessons were learned. These gameplay and system changes are also to be announced at the finals at the end of January. It was also mentioned that further hints will be given in the Japanese V Jump magazine, a publication that should be very familiar to fans of Dragon Ball FighterZ as it is usually the first place to get screenshots of new characters.
The internet was not happy about the lack of announcements, or rather the “announcement of announcements.” A mere 15 minutes after the live stream ended on Bandai Namco’s YouTube page, the dislike bar shot up by over 1,000! The like-to-dislike ration currently sits at 1.4K to 2.1K as of the time of this writing and continues to rise. Not to mention the fact that the stream was slated to be an hour long, and ended after only 45 minutes. So between the Xenoverse 2 and Super Dragon Ball Heroes announcement news, fans of FighterZ felt slighted as they had barely 15 minutes of stream time devoted to the game.
Stayed up, watching Bandai Namcos Dragon Ball Stream, hoping for actual #DBFZ news, should have gone to sleep instead -.-
— KC (@kc_vgc) January 15, 2019
@BandaiNamcoUS the only thing over 9000 is my absolute raging disappointment that you spent 40 mins revealing an 8 year old game and to "wait until the finals" #DBFZ pic.twitter.com/axxwC7VCL3
— rorb (@Bosozoku) January 15, 2019
No word was ever brought up about the game being pulled from EVO Japan, its questionable status at EVO this year, and nothing about Katsuhiro Harada, the producer of the Tekken franchise, being tasked to head the game’s competitive scene. A little bit of acknowledgment would have gone a long way to easing the minds of fans, but none was given.
We only have less than two weeks to go until the World Tour finals where we can finally get some concrete info on what is going on, but Bandai Namco sure didn’t make that wait any easier.
