These techniques and graphical additions, Hiroki says, were only now possible due to current-generation consoles. Making the game with the Unreal engine meant that the team could add light effects to the characters mid-battle with ease, as well as increase the scale (smashed-in buildings, demolished planets etc).

Instead of the next character nonchalantly stepping into the stage to continue the fight, there's a dramatic pause, and your character turns around to see another enemy fly toward them at high speed. My favorite of these comes when you defeat a character from your rival's three-player squad.

Battles include camera-angle changes and other adjustments to add cinematic flourishes to high-powered attacks, finishers and other moments that would get special attention if a fight were actually in an animated feature. Hiroki says that the way her team tried to re-create this anime look centered on what she calls 2.5D: a 3D-rendered game (made in the Unreal engine) that plays in 2D.

Producer Tomoko Hiroki explained to Engadget how the team focused on making the new game feel and look as close to the anime as possible. While the latest Xenoverse titles attempted to spin out Akira Toyama's characters into alternate universes with online play, Dragonball FighterZ is an easier-to-explain premise: a 2D fighter with the anime's top-flight characters, with assistance from the same talent that made BlazBlue and Guilty Gear, both well-regarded competitive 2D fighters.ĭFZ aims to be a properly crafted fighting game, but one with a huge injection of creative thought and polish. There have been so many Dragonball (Z or otherwise) games that it's hard to tell most of them apart.

Dragon ball unreal demo