This article is part of our Dragon Ball FighterZ series.
Look at any thread on Reddit or talk to anyone on social media and chances are you'll see talk about the meta of Dragon Ball FighterZ. Namely, many will say that the game has a character diversity problem. "Kid Buu and Cell are the only characters that people play," says everyone everywhere.
Rather than just feed into the frenzy that is the Reddit cycle of complaining and negativity, I figured I'd actually dig into the stats a bit and figure out if the claims of a stale meta are true. Last weekend was the perfect time to do so since we had three different tournaments taking place quite literally all over the world. There was Battle Arena Melbourne 10 in Australia, Stunfest 2018 in France, and Toryuken 7 in Toronto. We'll start by looking at the character breakdowns of the Top 8 for each event and then go from there.
BAM 10
- Vegeta (Super Saiyan) - 4
- Goku (Super Saiyan) - 3
- Kid Buu - 3
- Adult Gohan - 2
- Android 21 - 2
- Teen Gohan - 2
- Trunks - 2
- Android 16 - 1
- Bardock - 1
- Broly - 1
- Cell - 1
- Frieza - 1
- Goku Black - 1
- Maijin Buu - 1
- Tien - 1
- Yamcha - 1
Stunfest 2018
- Vegeta (Super Saiyan) - 5
- Kid Buu - 4
- Cell - 4
- Bardock - 3
- Trunks - 3
- Adult Gohan - 2
- Goku (Super Saiyan) - 1
- Gotenks - 1
- Yamcha - 1
Toryuken 7
- Cell - 4
- Goku Black - 3
- Hit - 3
- Vegeta (Super Saiyan) - 3
- Adult Gohan - 2
- Android 21 - 2
- Bardock - 2
- Goku (Super Saiyan) - 2
- Kid Buu - 1
- Trunks - 1
- Vegeta Blue - 1
Overall Top 8
- Vegeta (Super Saiyan) - 12
- Cell - 9
- Kid Buu - 8
- Adult Gohan - 6
- Bardock - 6
- Goku (Super Saiyan) - 6
- Trunks - 6
- Android 21 - 4
- Goku Black - 4
- Hit - 3
- Teen Gohan - 2
- Yamcha - 2
- Android 16 - 1
- Broly - 1
- Frieza - 1
- Gotenks - 1
- Maijin Buu - 1
- Tien - 1
- Vegeta Blue - 1
Okay, now that the list spam is out of the way, let's take a dive into what this means for the meta of Dragon Ball FighterZ.
Are Vegeta, Cell, and Kid Buu the most played characters right now? Yes. With that being said, though, it's not as bad as you might think at first glance.
Of the 24 participants in the Top 8 of these tournaments, half played Vegeta, a little over a third played Cell and exactly a third played Buu. If my math is correct (debatable), that means the vast majority of the 24 players did not play those three players. In fact, we saw a whopping 19 unique characters played. That's 73 percent of the entire 26 character roster. Granted, seven of those characters were only played by one person, but still. That's a lot of the roster being played.
When you narrow the scope a bit, however, and look at just the grand finals of these events, things are less diverse. While there was a total of 12 characters played between the six players, Baxter played six of them himself. I've never seen anyone play that many characters over the course of one set, so we're going to call him an extreme outlier. Once he's out of the picture, there were just eight unique characters across the other five players. You had four Vegetas, four Cells, and two Kid Buus. Okay, now we're starting to see some diversity issues.
It seems that while the field is playing a pretty diverse set of characters across the board, it's that upper echelon that is standing out above the rest with an almost predetermined set of characters. That becomes even more clear when we look at the breakdown of your everyday player via a Reddit Strawpoll (we're only into the most advanced of analytics here at EGN). Take this with a grain of a salt, obviously, but 26 (!!!!) characters were voted for at least 31 times (Majin Buu was at the bottom of the list with 31 votes). Of the roughly 1311 different players who voted, Goku Black managed to be the top pick, followed by Trunks, Bardock, Vegeta, Goku (Super Saiyan), and Cell rounding out the top six. So yeah, much more diverse than what we see at the top level of tournaments.
Is this more of an indictment of the FGC as a whole, though? Is playing top tier characters across the board and ignoring some of the lower tier ones just the norm at the highest levels of competition? To answer this question, let's look at the Top 8 and Top 2 breakdowns of the Street Fighter V: Arcade Edition and Tekken 7 brackets at the same three tournaments. (The Top 8 of Stunfest wasn't actually streamed, so we'll just be looking at BAM 10 and Toryuken for Tekken.)
To save some time and space, let's just look at the number of unique characters for these games rather than going through a list of all the characters.
Street Fighter V: Arcade Edition
- Unique characters in Top 8 - 14
- Unique characters in Top 2 - 4
Tekken 7
- Unique characters in Top 8 - 17
- Unique characters in Top 2 - 5
Now, the fact that DBFZ is a 3v3 kind of makes this harder to evaluate since there were a higher number of unique characters in the Top 2, making it look more diverse. But if you look not at the actual number but rather how many duplicates we saw, that's where DBFZ starts to look less diverse.
In SFV, only two players (out of six) used the same character in the Top 2. In T7, two players (of four) played the same character in the Top 2. Now, if you look at DBFZ, four players (of six) played duplicate characters. So while it's true that there is overlap at all top levels of play in the FGC, there seems to be more when it comes to DBFZ.
So the question of whether this game has a character diversity problem really boils down to what level of play you operate in. If you're just a casual player (i.e. not going to big tournaments or going deep into tournaments brackets) -- which is the vast majority of players -- then the meta is fine. If you're at the highest level of play, though? That's where things are getting a bit scripted and stale.
Can this be fixed or are we doomed to an eternity of the same few characters in the grand finals of event major event?
It can certainly be fixed, in a couple ways. The first is one that we'll see next week. Fused Zamasu and Vegito will finally be released after being first announced a few weeks back. While Bardock and Broly had hype surrounding them based on being new characters, these two seem to have even more. Their movesets (the eight-way movement of Zamasu could be insane) or animations (Vegito's kick with his arms folded is so anime in the best way possible) look to be different than anything we've seen thus far and can shake up the meta even if just marginally.
The other way that things can change is through balance changes. Yes, we just saw a "balance patch" a couple weeks back. But while it did address some of the issues with characters like Adult Gohan and Android 16, it didn't do enough. First, it left Cell alone, which was an indirect buff since other characters saw nerfs. Second, it didn't do enough to buff the rest of the roster. Outside of giving Frieza's 2H a bigger hitbox, no character really got a buff. The balance patch was 85 percent bug fixes, 10 percent nerfs, and 5 percent buffs. The next balance patch needs to have some actual balance changes in order to shake things up a bit. Bring other characters up to the level of Cell, Vegeta, and Kid Buu and maybe people will be more free to play other characters and still be successful.
With Combo Breaker coming up this weekend, which is the first time in awhile that we'll have pretty much all of the heavy hitters in one building, it will be interesting to see what kind of teams people will bring to the table. Will the Top 8 and Top 2 follow the pattern we saw last weekend? Or will things look a bit more varied?
Even if everyone plays the same team, though, you can bet that the competition will be fierce and you definitely won't want to miss a minute of it.
