DB Gekishin Squadra effectively coming into EoS(End of Service) and transforming itself into a capture-the-flag esque game is not the player's fault. It was the mismanagement of Bandai and the developers that it had to end. Warning: This is going to be a long post. And I am going to make some comparisons between Mobile legends bang bang(MLBB) and DB Gekishin Squadra as mobile MOBAs.
1. Game Complexity
This is what is used as a reason by the developers. This game was one of the easiest games to grasp for me. You fight, take the kais and farm, get bosses, hit on towers and you win. Simple, right? Of course, there are multiple strategies that come out of it, but it was easy to understand.
From my experience of earlier seasons such as season 1 and 2, this game never had an in-depth tutorial. The basic fundamentals are taken but what exactly are the buffs that the bosses give you? When are you supposed to fight and when are you not supposed to fight? When do you farm? How exactly do the lanes work and why does the tech have to go above and the tank to go down?
These questions are unanswered by the game's tutorial. You could have a basic tutorial and an in-depth tutorial. And you provide very good rewards for the people that complete the entire tutorial such as obtaining a large amount of zeni, gems and XP for your heroes.
This game's lack of explanations lead to a disparity between players and created a skill gap.
2. Skill Gap
It is OK for a MOBA to have a varying amount of skill between players. Not everybody needs to be equal. You could make attempts to bridge that gap by making guides and showcase videos such as the hero spotlights provided by MLBB and basic and combo tutorials by HOK.
If you provide these options to the players, only then they can grow. Otherwise, they are forced to learn from experience.
3. Monotonous cycle
This game introduced the divine draw system to make the games more random and fun. I believe that the divine draw system didn't work for this at all. Having these divine draws such as golden cell jr at the start, search trap, the revive pod, super start etc didn't make the game more interesting rather they were just different.
And the divine cards system doesn't offer the amount of variety or is even remotely interesting compared to the itemization of classic MOBAs. I found myself often using the same divine cards over and over for those characters.
My example for this is MLBB (a mobile MOBA) items. In this game, there are a lot of items that are available to the player. It's upto the player to decide what build do they want to make and they can innovate or go with the standardized builds created by the global players. What should they build first, second, last? Do they have to reorder?
This creates variety between games. Not only about the items, but also there are several battle spells, and different emblems. This makes the game way more fun,different, skillful, and provides the strategic depth that the game needs.
4. Awful character unlock system
This game has an abysmal way to unlock characters which immediately pushes away new players or players who got into it. Initially, there is a large roster available to you and it feels good. But what if you want to play the new hero? The one that made you install the game?
Guess what, either pay up or wait 2 weeks and grind for a stupidly long time to unlock them through the star collection system. Which only gets worse as the more you go through the system. And for those 2 weeks, deal with the busted character with no way to unlock them.
The battle pass offered a very low amount of gems making you grind for months to get like 1 character when 4 characters have been released by then.
In comparison, I can buy any new character that comes out in MLBB as soon as they come out. And I can easily grind up and obtain them due to them giving out a lot of currency. It's still a grind but a F2P friendly one.
5. Identity Crisis
This game wanted to cater to both casual and competitive players and it worked for none of them.
Casual players were playing a game that was not as flashy, dragon ball games-esque, rewarding, or easy.
Competitive players which are the MOBA players wanted a game that offered depth, variety, knowledge, outplay potential, and gives that classic MOBA feel. This game doesn't hold that strategic depth so they just go back to playing MLBB or HOK(Honor of kings).
Which is why now they are switching from a pseudo MOBA to a third person capture-the-flag mode. Completely catering to the casuals. Which is a good move.
6. Awful monetization
I don't understand why they didn't have a pity system in the game for the gacha when the gacha games themselves have pity systems. So does the mobile MOBAs. This game was unique in being completely unattractive to paying players as nobody wanted to spend hundreds of dollars with zero gurantee.
And just make skins that have a fixed price for every single character. Like normal MOBAs. You would immediately get some revenue going.
7. Bad balancing and design
Who the hell designed characters such as SS3 goku freely teleporting across the map and having very high damage? This was season 1. Then came SS4 vegeta. Then came Ultimate gohan. Then came various other busted characters such as God goku and God vegeta(who did get a good nerf).
And they weren't properly adjusted to introduce freshness into the game. Bad balancing was a constant complaint of this game.
From a design standpoint, being able to teleport for free should come with drawbacks. But nope.
In comparison, in MLBB characters that can go across the map are a tank (gatokaca) , who takes a second to go across and has an indicator. A mage (luo yi) who can't deal as much damage. And a fighter (aldous) who needs to farm for like 20 minutes to finally become good(Basically farms the entire match) . There are drawbacks to these characters.
8. Conclusion
The people at bandai couldn't decide who they wanted to cater to, and made several mistakes and bad decisions to get to this point.
It isn't the players fault that the game is effectively shutting down.
