Treat it the same way you treat normal footsies in fighting games, gobble up the space and corner them.
It IS annoying to fight someone that is continually running away, but that’s the name of the game sometimes. You just have to have patience and gobble up the space as they give it to you. The thing you DONT want to do though is always over extend against it. That’s where you will get killed. Tag games are like a dance to see who makes good contact with who, first. Once you get good contact the world is yours for a decently long time in dbfz. In marvel it’s more about making your first or second contact have a mixup in it so that your opponent can’t pushblock you since they are getting hit. In dbfz the mixups aren’t good enough for that so it’s about making contact into a chain on block, call your assist, do a mixup as the assist is getting blocked, if you get blocked again, call your next assist and do another mixup, if you get blocked again right there, you no longer have assists for pressure so you either back off and let your assists cool down or you use meter for a plus on block special and go into another long ass chain hoping your assist cooldown in that time, or you go for a DR hoping your opponent will be caught off guard. That’s the basic of offense in dbfz. It of course gets a lot muddier and gray than that. You can also do stagger strings to allow your assist to start to cooldown, you can do various staggers dashes, you can pop sparking so that you can get more pressure on block via jump cancels into IAD.
Another very basic aspect of dbfz is that it’s hard to jumpin on people. Jumps don’t go far enough and dash jumps go to far. IAD is in a hotly contested spacing so it’s not the greatest idea either. So one of the things to be looking out for is air to airs. If you guess wrong you will tend to overshoot and be safe if you did dash jump (though there are easy counters to that) if you guess right and hit them, you confirm into a 2H and get a free combo. If you get blocked you just continue pressure as you land on top of them.
Dbfz is easy to get into if you use a character with an aerial beam like Goku or krillin or kidbuu or gotenks because the beam beats basically everything that isn’t a beam and it combos on hit and can even give pressure on block if your opponent is sleeping.
Team games aren’t all made the same though, comparing dbfz to marvel is kinda like comparing streetfighter to kof or whatever, They all have their little quirks like as an example, in dbfz the tactics I just talked about are pretty solid but in marvel they really aren’t. In marvel you can use assist to start your offense since assists are high priority, but in dbfz they aren’t.
Etc etc. all you have t do is play them for awhile and their little idiosyncrasies will become apparent. Dbfz is way less of an assist fighter than marvel though. In marvel assists are used primarily in neutral, in dbfz they are primarily used in blockstrings. Etc etc
I don’t know if you’re willing to play unconventional characters in DBFZ but you can try Ginyu. His Ginyu Force attacks have some decent lockdown/screen covering + plus potential combo breakers. His main weakness seems to be the startup on the force attacks are lengthy and can get you super dashed if you’re not veyr careful, but once you get him going his pressure is superb especially with assists.
Something I forgot to mention is when your opponent retreats to fullscreen, your first thought shouldn’t be “how do i get in” but instead “ok now we play neutral” the reason why you want to get in so bad is more than likely because you are new and want to practice your offense, or because your neutral is bad and you don’t want to deal with neutral yet.
But offense comes after neutral so you should do whatever it takes to get good at neutral and once that happens, when people run away from you you won’t be in a huge hurry to get in because you know your neutral can pull you through anyways… and once that happens you will start to notice people running from you less because your movement will reflect your intentions. But also, don’t be worried about doing “scrub shit” like random homing dashes to get in. While it isn’t something that you should be leaning on or doing predictably, ot also isn’t something that you should leave out of your game. Long range homing dashes become much more viable once you have neutral down. And neutral in dbfz (and most tags games) to a certain extent is all about making your opponent pay for mistakes, of which there are ALOT that your opponent can make, so simply being patient while remaining active with your movement can allow you to stay away from your own mistakes while maximising your chances of being in proper position to capitalize on your opponents mistakes. What’s a mistake? Doing basically anything predictably with regards to attacking, whiffing dumb stuff, doing fullscreen homing dashes when your opponent is grounded looking for your homing dash, dashing into a beam or ranged move, allowing your opponent to run in on you and put you in blockstun, moving into the corner, using a long startup ranged move very close and getting hit in startup or using a fast startup move with no range and whiffing and being wiff punished by like a beam or something…
Etc etc
Primary mistake I’m looking for from any opponent is letting me get into certain ranges while they are recovering from something. That’s party time.
Super dash or jumping forward at them with a light button that converts into air to air seems to be the most commonly used options. There’s no true air grabs here so can’t chase them down with air grabs like in other marvel or anime games.
just a small video of a few combos i have on tape… more is already done but trying not to blow my load. more so just trying to tide people over till vegito comes out and hopefully that motivates me to finish up all the old stuff like this and do some new things
well since you can SD after his jumping sword and his jH and j2H are like piccolos.
His universal bnb into skd might be something along the lines of 2M5M jLjMjL JSword SD jLjMjLj2H jAirgrab. from the look of it for the standard 4.2k damage.
the bummer is that the jAirgrab seem to be switching sides.
his sword look cool for combo extension.
His assist is a good smokescreen. Look pretty nice for kambo extension with the hitstun it has. Might not be bad for standard blockstring extend as well and cover a decent neutral area (can be beaten by SD but is very fast so…)
We didnt see much of the kicks if they are rekka or what.
multi hit on what seem to be his 5L mean insta winning clashes xD.
his slide will probably psych me out a thousand time before i stop thinking it’s a jump xD.
Looks like his big thing is long range approach, including high/low mixups. Low seems to come out a lot slower than his rapid overhead or his Kicks, partially due to it sliding
His specials consist of: The Rekka Kicks, the Explosion Ball, the Spirit Sword, the air grab, an aerial fireball throw angled down, and a counter
His…fireball? That Black Hole explosion thing comes out at a set distance either point blank or midscreen-ish
The counter goes into that face slam move he used in the trailer, but it’s slow for a counter and VERY obvious. I don’t see it getting used much except to stuff obvious Super Dashes.
It looks like Vegito’s got an angles problem. A lot of his moves flow into one another, but only in specific circumstances. His aerial sword goes almost straight down and leaves them away from him, as an example, making it tough to get length combos.
That said, both his normal supers have an ass ton of reach, so he might be a heavy bar spending character as a result
Vegito’s assist is pretty nice. It’s the angled fireball. It comes out fast and covers a ton of space. Like the entire screen big. Based on what they are, they can probably be Superdashed through though. Still, looks mad useful zone control. With Vegeta assist semi-nerfed, I can see this being a new choice for neutral control, albeit not lockdown
Final Kamehameha isn’t that strong of an ultimate as others, coming in at 4100 ish compared to Kid Buu’s 4300, but it’s a beam and it’s air-possible so you know, strong enough.
I think he’s got 21’s problem by the looks of it, where he seems to lack a sliding knockdown after his jH, instead getting a wallbounce, and needs to use his air grab to compensate
The Sword Super looks like it recovers quick enough that you can combo out of it when used in a DHC. Like Vegeta or Cell.
It looks like the idea is that his openers leave opponents at spots where it’s hard to make a connection with damage, which is why the grounded Spirit Sword is basically an anti-air, only hitting grounded opponents close up. I’m unsure on combo potential. It LOOKS fine, but it combo’d in the best circumstance. The move flings them a set distance each time, meaning that hitting them at the tip like in the stream leaves the least distance for Vegito to travel (right above him), while a close range sword might fling them too far back. Too early to tell, needs to be labbed.
The L air grab has like no range. It leads to a techable knockdown, but leaves Vegito comparatively close (about 1/3rd a screen away) and able to act soon. His M air grab gives sliding and is easy to combo into, but leaves them on the other side of the screen.
