Extreme Butoden: How does it compare to other 2D fighters?

[Silkman3003]

Well, mostly concerning past 2D DBZ fighters

For people who have Extreme Butoden , or have followed it very closely or maybe heard input from others who played the game...

How would you say it compares to other 2D DBZ fighting games like Ultimate Butoden, Super DBZ, or hell even The Budokai Games?(B3, SBAR, IW, etc). In terms of depth, diversity in characters , replayability, etc.

[Rad Raddish]

It's hard for me to say as I've mostly just been grinding to unlock assists. I'd have a much better picture of the game if I could try out the multiplayer. And with the lack of training mode it's somewhat difficult to see what kind of things are possible within the engine.

That said, I think the game looks nice, sounds nice, and is fun overall, but it's not really clicking with me. I think I attribute a lot of that to the "dial-a-combo" system they have going, but that didn't hurt Budokai for a lot of people. However, Budokai at least had guard cancels that led to some interesting (and tricky) combos.

Maybe there's something like that waiting to be discovered (or maybe it already has been) in Extreme Butoden, but it seems like the best combos/setups are achieved by using assists. But those are activated through the touch screen, which makes the controls for the game a bit of a mess (or maybe I'm just uncoordinated ). It would have been nice if there were some button shortcuts to call your selected assists so I didn't have to keep switching between "tapping" and having my hands on the traditional buttons.

But to more directly answer your original question, I think it feels a lot like Ultimate Butoden, where the combat is somewhat simplified but there still appears to be some depth to be explored (especially with the team building aspect). And unlike Ultimate Butoden, there's no annoying minigames for the "super" attacks, which is great. (Well, there is still the "beam battle" that occurs when another player counters your super, but that plays out more like Super Butoden where you just have to mash A quicker than the other guy).

Diversity of characters is actually pretty high from what I've seen. While some people might view it as short on "playable" characters vs. the supports/assists, they all have unique attacks and combo strings that make everyone worth checking out. And the support characters have lots of different effects/uses, so it'll be fun to try and build the "ultimate" team for versus play, or even set a lower DP limit and find the best team you can make on a budget (DP are the points assigned to each characters in team building).

I don't think the single player modes will be interesting enough for replayability, but I feel that way about almost every DBZ fighting game (except the story mode in Budokai 1, and that's just for the cutscenes). It all comes down to how fun the versus play ends up being. I'm excited to find out on October 20th! Hope my import copy will be able to play with the US version, otherwise I'll have to buy two.