Dragon Ball FighterZ is the fighting game for everyone

Editor's note: This is an early impressions piece based on a week with Dragon Ball FighterZ - following the somewhat shaky online betas, we're waiting until the release on Friday for the opportunity to test out the game online on fully stressed servers before we commit to our final review.

Fighting games are, generally, inaccessible. It is a genre stifled by an inescapable brick wall that emerges after the story mode is done and dusted, or a few run throughs of arcade mode are behind you. It is the realisation that in order to get better, there's a shed load of stuff to learn, a whole lot of complex input commands to memorise, and a bucket full of hours to sink into training mode to bring it all together. And then you venture online and get smashed to bits anyway.

I've been playing Dragon Ball FighterZ non-stop for a week now, and while I'll hold off on a review until I've had a chance to test online play, I have a decent enough handle on the game's systems to praise not just how accessible it is, but how it manages to make its systems accessible without reducing the experience to a mind-numbing mush for fighting game aficionados. Japanese developer Arc System Works, which is famous within fighting game circles for making the superb but complex Guilty Gear and BlazBlue games, walks a fine line here, but it does so with aplomb.

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