so, after playing for nearly 120 hours, getting used to each roll, finding characters that fit my playstyle, understanding the more nuanced aspects of how to technically "win" in this game, I must say that even though I have a net positive experience with this game... I still have a lot of pain points that I need to address.
Let's start with the positives:
The gameplay is addicting and fast paced. Characters having their own unique abilities based on attacks from the show adds variety to each roll, the card system allows you to go all in on a certain roll like Teq being able to get even faster with straight blue cards, or you can mix and match to make pseudo rolls like a tanky buu with green cards that can heal. Music is fitting for every interaction although some tracks are just renditions of scores from Z and super, this is not a negative, but I feel like they could have done something original there. The god of destruction system (even for how utterly flawed it is, more on that in a moment) feels like to score on and the concept alone is unique, even if it does share a little with Pokemon Unites score system, but not enough to be a blatant rip off.
Now, for the negatives:
Some characters are blatantly more powerful than others to an absolutely laughable degree, let's take Jiren for example. Sure, he isn't THAT op if you understand his abilities and passives passed a cursory glance. If he gets stronger each second he is in battle, simply employ a hit and run tactic to make his passive less effective. You could say that is proper game balance, but let me argue that he does a more effective job at stalling for time than Bardock. If you HAVE to employ a hit and run tactic with Jiren, but only maybe have to do that with bardock, the more time you have to wait for Jiren's passive to die down before you can re-engage is effectively wasting more time on Jiren than you are with Bardock. Bardock only gets a defensive boost, while Jiren gets an attack boost and Defense boost. this can be "countered" with flanks from another lane, but considering this game is mostly revolving around time management more than anything having to do with team fights, it would be best to just completely ignore the Jiren and all enemy players for that matter and focus your efforts on the gods of destruction.
That leads nicely into my second pain point with the game itself, the god of destructions system is inherently flawed. How, you may ask? Well, let's start with the scoring, or rather, damaging mechanic. When Xeno is smacking one of the gods in the head with his hammer, they will be available to attack. When standing in a god zone, your abilities can be used to damage the gods. This isn't the flawed part, and in fact I like the idea of forcing your attacks to be on cool down, it adds risk to scoring... or at least it would, if this idea wasn't marred by the fact that you literally cannot fail at doing damage to the gods. The enemy team can attempt to interrupt your damaging of the god by simply attacking you, which, yes, I like that. What I don't like is the fact that if you have ANY amount of the attack you used charged, the god is STILL damaged in the amount equal to the amount you had charged on it. For exaple, you are playing SSJ3 Goku, You risk not being able to Instant Transmission by using that ability on the god to do a big hit. You are only able to charge it half way because someone came over and hit you off the god. Now, you would expect for that to completely stop you from damaging the god, but no, you still end up damaging the god anyways equal to the amount of whatever half of your ability charge was worth.
Now, that brings me to my final pain point:
You don't need to win a single team fight to win in this game. Really, it's that easy. Next time you play ranked, get to level 5 and then simply ignore all enemies and mobs and rush the gods of destruction. You can literally fly into them like a moth to a flame and spam your abilities on the gods, lose EVERY team fight, hell, you don't even need to damage players. Just focus all efforts on backdooring or blatantly flying passed the enemy team to deal even a fraction of damage to the gods. Even if you are interrupted, you're still doing damage. I have seen MANY ranked players do this with speedy characters, get absolutely pummeled all game long, yet still win because they can respawn really quickly due to their low levels and just rush the gods of destruction. My team can have over 40+ eliminations on the enemy team, and still lose because interrupting the enemy teams scores on the gods does essentially nothing because of their low respawn timers and the fact you can still damage the gods regardless if someone interrupts you or not. Sure, some characters feel specifically tailored to counter this kind of playstyle, namely a couple in the Teq category... but other than that, there is literally nothing you can do most of the time against this playstyle other than play around it and act as a goalie that can only limit the enemy team into getting half points.
My suggestions? Fix the scoring/damage mechanic. Interrupts should entirely stop damage on a god of destruction, or, at the very least, have the interrupt damage be locked behind one of the more challenging bosses to defeat (I use the word challenging loosely). If you or the enemy team get that boss, then your team should be allowed that advantage after earning it. Games in ranked typically devolve into teams having someone chump on low levels to rush gods of destruction, and both sides being afraid to even more because they have to be on constant watch for a level 5 frieza or some other speedy teq character rushing at their gods like a suicide bomber.
This game has a great concept, very addicting gameplay, and unique gameplay at that for mostly all of its character. The only thing marring it down is the scoring/damaging system. I give it a 6/10, barely over the mark of positive, but it would be a 8-9 out of 10 if that issue was addressed.
