First Impressions: Dragon Ball Z: Dokkan Battle

Dragon Ball Z: Dokkan Battle is a gacha-style mobile game on iOS and Google Play that features characters from all iterations of the franchise (from Dragon Ball to GT to Xenoverse and beyond) fighting it out. This game isn’t new by any means, launching globally in 2015, but it is definitely a new experience for me. I’m someone who doesn’t typically play a mobile game for longer than 48 hours, and I especially don’t care for gacha-style games as I usually don’t have the patience for random chance. To my surprise, however, Dokkan Battle has had me logging in every day since I downloaded it almost a week ago, and playing for lengthy stretches at a time. It is important to note, however, that I am a massive Dragon Ball Z fan and not a gacha fan, so take that as you will.

Dokkan Battle blends elements of CCG, tabletop-style-games, and puzzles to create an interesting but entertaining experience. Players are tasked with creating teams of six (along with an additional seventh “friend” member) to deploy in missions, where the player then navigates through a board game map collecting Zeni and items while avoiding hazards and engaging in combat. When assembling your team, there are numerous factors to consider. Each character has one of five types: blue AGI, yellow PHY, red STR, purple INT, and green TEQ, with each type being strong against one and weak to another.

Characters also have leader skills, passive skills, and super attacks. Your team always has a leader card, so you’ll want to select your leader based on their leader skill. Passive skills vary by character but can greatly support the rest of your team depending on your team’s makeup. Super attacks are strong attacks used when your character’s ki meter fills completely. Not only do they inflict massive damage on your opponent, but many of them come with additional effects as well. Plus, you get a cool animation to go with each one that are usually quick nods to the source material. When getting into more advanced sections of the game, there is also the character’s category and class to consider, which in the beginning might make it seem like the game is throwing a lot at you but once you get into it it’s easy to get into the groove.

The characters that will make up your team are given to you gacha-style via summoning character cards with Dragon Stones (the in-game currency). Like most other gacha games, the character cards are ranked by rarity, with SSR being the highest rank you can pull for. Considering just how many characters there are in the Dragon Ball universe, you have plenty of possibilities to choose from. And considering there are numerous different categories to consider, it’s very likely that you can make a viable team with all your favorite characters present as long as they share a class or category.

When in combat, you are shown three characters in a line-up. You can arrange your characters in any order that you’d like, which can sometimes be important depending on your character’s abilities. What’s more, characters also have Link Skills based on their affinity with other characters (similar to their category) which can provide small bonuses in battle. On the battlefield, the goal is to match up as many orbs in a row based on your characters color type to increase their ki bar so you can use super attacks. The actual combat is fairly simplistic and mostly comes down to whether or not your layout was prepared properly before entering the battle. You also can equip support items before deploying on missions that can range from healing to buffing allies and debuffing enemies.

There are plenty of other factors to take into consideration when trying to optimize your team, but from my limited experience, you don’t need to think too much about the more advanced play until you go for Dokkan events to evolve certain characters. In the beginning, the game is fairly generous with Dragon Stones, giving out stones for hitting level milestones and completing different missions. Each story quest offers a total of 3 stones (1 for each difficulty rank) so it’s in your best interest to play through the story in the beginning so that you can get as many pulls as you can early on.

In short, Dokkan Battle is a fun distraction that lets a huge DBZ nut like myself to collect my favorite characters and assemble them into dream teams for my own amusement. The combat is simple at a beginner level but can become more in-depth later on if you want it to. This is definitely a game I can see myself sinking time into for weeks to come.

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