Fortunately, Kakarot’s combat is smartly designed so that you can always evade to cancel out of a combo and get the hell out of the way when you can see something dangerous is being obviously telegraphed. Most enemies have dangerous attacks that absorb strikes in order to deal one of their own that can immediately stop you in your tracks and leave you stunned, forcing you to carefully balance offense and your extremely mobile defensive options. While this may seem very button-mashy – and to an extent it is – it’s a combat system that nonetheless forces you to be reactive to what your opponent is doing. You’re always locked on and tethered to your opponent, too, allowing you to move toward, away from, and orbit around them midair with ease, and you can switch between targets with a simple flick of the right stick. Combat is simple, focused on one-button combos and a customizable selection of four special moves, but loaded with little intricacies that go a long way when it comes to keeping the action from ever becoming thoughtless.

Put another way, it feels sort of like a Dragon Ball powered version of Yakuza in its free-roaming segments, and then shifting to a traditional Xenoverse/Tenkaichi-like fighting game once combat starts. Kakarot strikes an unusual genre balance between an arena fighting game and a semi-open-world action-RPG.

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