Even cooler: once you've finished a battle, multiple chapters are unlocked, and you can skip along the individual story threads however you want. Once you've beaten that character, a smallish epilogue will play out, but more interestingly, an end-fight screen recaps exactly what Drama Scenes and Battle Objectives (read: basic challenges like "land the first attack" or " "defeat your opponent in 90 seconds") were earned, and then grades your fight on those conditions. What's interesting is that the normal single-player game, Z Chronicles, actually sticks you with a pre-set character and opponent and then plays out the storyline. Other fighters, like Tien, seemed a little more juggle-heavy. Being something of a reboot for the series, the absolutely massive triple-digit fighter roster has been trimmed to a more modest couple-dozen, which made understanding how Goku fought different from, say, Piccolo (one uses quicker, more short-range strikes while the other has slightly slower ones with more range thanks to his snake-like limbs). YES NO After running through the tutorial that took us through the basics of movement, attacks, dodging/blocking/reversing and using the Ki Meter to unleash ranged attacks and super moves, we decided to see what the differences were between the various fighters. It takes practice, but then that's why the game offers something for most levels of play. The idea is that you can unleash a potent barrage of attacks, sure, but the other player can counter or dodge or even reverse some moves with split-second timing. Activating Aura Spark mode boosts defense and turns normal moves into supers, but it also has a very short window with which to unleash hell. Balance is the key here, so things like being able to go Super Saiyan unlocks far more powerful basic attacks (and at times even augment move lists with bigger, flashier versions) but also lowers defense. It relies on simple, quick-fire counters and a balance between being twitchy or slightly button-mashing friendly and strategic blocks or carefully timed super attacks. In stark contrast to the rote memorization and frame-counting hardcore feel of fighters like Virtua Fighter, Burst Limit tries to keep the move sets fairly basic. While we were all too happy to run the game through its basic paces, we finally had time to check out the latest build of the title and decided to dig a little deeper into the differences between fighters.Īs has been well-established by now, the Dragon Ball Z games are designed from the ground up to be accessible from the start yet reward players that have gotten steeped in the core mechanics for a while. We've taken a few peeks at the progress of the latest in Japanese developer Dimps' surprisingly newbie-friendly brawler: first at GDC a few months ago and then about a week and a half ago.