It is a shame to give this a negative review, as Gekishin Squadra had the elements of a good game, but unfortunately has been plagued by an identity crisis ever since launch, and, as of August 29th, is planned by Bandai Namco and Ganbarion to transition from a MOBA to a 3D casual team brawler in about two months time.
This is a game that has unfortunately been stuck in a middle ground its entire life cycle, unable to decide if it should appeal to MOBA fans or more casual Dragonball fans. On the casual side, the new player experience left a lot to be desired, with a weak tutorial and lobbies that fill players with bots across the vast majority of lower ranks, leading to players developing bad habits (such as ignoring the minimap and relying on auto builds), which, if they even stuck with the game long enough to reach lobbies with real players, led to a learning curve that appears seemingly out of nowhere.
On the other hand, the game did not have enough complexity to appeal to typical MOBA fans, as the game only featured two lanes and lacked a jungle, card builds did not have the depth of items in other MOBAs (and were very poorly balanced with maybe a third of them having any real use), a complete lack of bans/draft phase as a whole, and the meta at higher elo/tournament play was miserable to play as the game went on due to poor balancing by the dev team. Multiple characters have been problematic releases, with Bardock and God Goku being the biggest offenders (and later Bulma), persisting at 53+% win rates for months without dev intervention. There was also a complete lack of in-game resources to discover information on the characters. You could not simply look up how much HP your character had or how much damage a move did. You either relied on going into training mode and calculating it manually, or praying that a patch note made reference to a damage or HP number. A lack of deranking and ineffectual reporting also left the lowest tier of each rank (along with max rank) to cause people to grief at the smallest of inconveniences. Solo queue was also not a great experience. Due to the aforementioned issues, teammate quality varied at each rank tier that ranks essentially were meaningless. You could have max rank players not knowing how to play the game. This was also compounded by the main rank queue allowing people to play four stack against solo queuers, leading to people peaking at ranks they otherwise shouldn't have attained and causing unbalanced matchmaking.
The game is reasonably generous as far as the capsules needed to get animations in-game, and characters, while paywalled at first, become free to obtain after 2-3 weeks. The value for grinding the game is not there though. The battle pass gives minimal rewards, and the end of season ranked rewards are pathetic. The monetization also got worse as the game went on, culminating in the Xenoverse 2 collaboration gacha banners that featured summonable skins at a 0.25% rate, the lowest rate of anything summonable in a Dragonball game since some of the earliest banners in Dokkan and Legends. This was combined with zero pity mechanics, and not even currency sales to drop alongside the banner. This was alongside minimal cosmetics for f2p players, leading to the entire collaboration boiling down to a whale bait banner. Instead of listening to feedback regarding the banner and how the community felt about it, they then proceeded to run back the exact same format for a summer banner.
This pattern of lacking dev communication has been the story for the entire games lifespan, buffs and nerfs seemingly happen at random, with characters staying strong and weak for months without properly being addressed. The creator program was also essentially abandoned like three months into the game, leading to many of the largest content creators not actually have a relationship with the devs, while creators who barely played the game were kept in.
The stability of the game has also gotten worse recently, likely because resources were pulled from the current build to work on what they are transitioning the game to. Nevertheless, the game has had issues with desync since launch, Error code 0 causing people to crash mid-match, and poor optimization (especially on mobile devices, not relevant to this platform but they do appear as your teammates).
The worst part of all of this is that this was all theoretically fixable with time. Ganbarion has never worked on a MOBA before, and it showed, as they seemingly did not want to learn from mistakes and problems with game design and balance that Riot/Valve have already solved long ago with League/Dota. They didn't even learn from the monetization mistakes/improvements of other mobile games within the same IP. Unfortunately, given that this changeover is scheduled to happen this year, time was never in their favor. Resources have likely been reallocated for months at this point, if not since the game's launch. Balance patches were reduced to barebones numerical tweaks rather than fixing problematic mechanics, and characters across the last two seasons repeatedly dropped in a bugged state taking weeks to resolve, if they even got a confirmation of a fix.
The cherry on top of all of this is that Ganbarion (most likely at the behest of Bandai Namco) put out a [url=https://dbg-squadra.bn-ent.net/en-us/news/484xse-hdv]developer letter[/url] on August 29th, where they said the following "Since its conception, GEKISHIN SQUADRA's goal was to be an experience where players could enjoy Dragon Ball team battles anytime, anywhere, and with anyone. However, over time, we found that the game's strategic depth and knowledge-based mechanics often created a large cap between the top performing players and everyone else in terms of game literacy. As a result, new players often encountered lopsided matches and a high barrier to competitive play, leading to a gameplay experience that did not fully meet their expectations." Scapegoating your loyal playerbase, instead of taking accountability for absent new player onboarding, poor tutorials, and flawed matchmaking is either lazy or disingenuous. If EA or Ubisoft had come out with a statement like this over a major multiplayer title, they would almost assuredly have been clowned up and down social media. They also did this a week after hosting an in-person World Championship in Japan which ultimately just highlights the hypocrisy and mismatched expectations for this game.
The question remains, did the game want to appeal to more hardcore players or to a more casual audience? An in-person worlds tournament and live streams where they brought on League streamers to play the game indicate targeting a more competitive audience. The higher-ups, likely by launching the game on mobile and introducing gacha mechanics, likely expected similar player counts and revenue to other DB mobile titles, evidence of targeting a more casual audience. Trying to appeal to everyone ultimately left this game appealing to a very small percentage of players.
Lastly, the change to a new genre is virtually unprecedented and has no successful track record. Ganbarion does capture the Dragonball flair very well, the animations and visuals of this game are evidence enough, but I struggle to see the appeal over already established DB arena fighters that were built from the ground up for that purpose, and am doubtful that the new iteration will manage to keep the essence of what made Squadra special intact.
