Dragon Ball FighterZ season 3 changes announced

Feb. 8 saw the competition at the Dragon Ball FighterZ World Tour Finals in Paris, France whittle down to the top 8. Shockingly, the favorite of many to take the whole event, Sonic Fox, is not included in the proceedings this go around. Even more exciting than the top 8, however, are the just-announced changes coming to season 3 of Dragon Ball FighterZ.

Producer Tomoko Hiroki addressed the fans and competitors after Day 1 of the event to go over some changes to the battle system that will be made this coming season, and wow, they are some doozies. First is the “Z Assist Special.” Each character will have three assists to choose from, akin to Marvel vs. Capcom 2. Each character will have an A, B, and C assist, and based on what we can see in the video, it looks like it will greatly open up options available for characters, something that lower-tier characters will be more than happy to have. Hiroki stated they want to try to avoid players picking characters solely for their assist.

Also mentioned is some sort of new comeback mechanic. Although the information on this is slim, a new meter above the round timer can clearly be seen in footage that seems to slide back and forth between both players. When Gohan enters the battle his character portrait gains a large, swooping graphic below it, and his Level 3 does insane damage against Cell, evaporating almost three quarters of his life bar. Hiroki stated they are trying to avoid the one-sided battles that competitive Dragon Ball FighterZ can be known for.

This past season Bandai Namco decided that no major updates would be made to the game during the competitive season, essentially letting anything rock until the finals. Many players didn’t like this approach due to factors like the overwhelming presence of GT Goku skewing the results and team makeup of so many top 8s around the world.

With season 3 though, Bandai Namco is now open to making mid-season changes, much to the relief of players all over the world. Hiroki stated that they would most likely make one big update with sweeping changes instead of multiple, small changes throughout the year. Either way, this is a very smart decision for competitive Dragon Ball FighterZ in the future.

These changes are meant to improve the overall experience for players. By opening up options for more characters to be viable and more creative freedom for players to fight how they want, this is certainly the smart way to go about it. But one thing mentioned that is important is that Hiroki specifically mentions characters being picked (or not) for their size. This is more than likely a reference to the incredible strength of fuzzies in DBFZ, which can make certain characters less feasible for competitive play due to their large size like Broly. Conversely, this can also make smaller characters much more powerful based on this fact alone, like GT Goku and Gotenks. Removing fuzzies will go a long way towards making DBFZ more fun for players and a better competitive fighting game.

Some smaller changes mentioned in the video were a brand new UI, and on the character select screen, it is easy to see that there is enough room for at least six more characters, possibly even eight. One of those characters we already know to be Ultra Instinct Goku.

Lastly, one small change noticed in the video that wasn’t mentioned is that you can clearly see Goku absorbing a ki blast from Jeice’s special move from Captain Ginyu by charging ki. It appears that charging ki will now nullify weak projectile attacks, which will make charging ki actually useful outside of specific Gotenks ghost setups.

Season 3 of Dragon Ball FighterZ is shaping up to be very exciting, and top 8 for the World Tour Finals will begin on Sunday, Feb. 9 at 3 p.m. CET / 9 a.m. ET /6 a.m. PT.