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SonicFox tops first Panda Global rankings (PGRZ) for Dragon Ball FighterZ

Panda Global's PGstats team has branched outside of Super Smash Bros. for the first time and offered its first comprehensive list of the top players in Dragon Ball FighterZ, with EVO champion SonicFox sitting at the top.

Ozzie Mejia

August 31, 2018 6:05 PM

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Panda Global Gaming's PGstats team has been one of the backbones of the Super Smash Bros. gaming community for a couple of years. Most of the competitive gaming world is familiar with their PGR ranking system, which helps rank the top players in the world. Earlier in the year, PGstats also dove into Super Smash Bros. Melee, but this week, the team branched outside of Smash for the first time ever, creating the first definitive ranking system for the top Dragon Ball FighterZ players in the world.

The first ever PGRZ #1 player in the world is Dominique "SonicFox" McLean. Prior to DBFZ, SonicFox was widely recognized as the top NetherRealm fighter in the world, having conquered a multitude of Mortal Kombat X and Injustice 2 tournaments from across the globe. He was also a top player in Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite (before that community got kneecapped) and Skullgirls. Now SonicFox stands atop the Dragon Ball FighterZ world, cementing himself as the top player in the world with victories at Combo Breaker 2018 and EVO 2018, the latter of which set an EVO record for concurrent viewers.

As one might guess, SonicFox's rival Goichi "GO1" Kushida sits right behind him at #2. Goichi came out firing with a first-place finish at Final Round, DBFZ's first major tournament, and has barely given an inch. He has yet to finish outside the top four at any tournament he's entered and looked like a surefire bet to come away with the #1 spot before SonicFox went Super Saiyan in the last few months. SonicFox and Goichi are separated by a paper-thin margin, making them more of a #1 and #1a than a #1 and #2, with their rivalry establishing them as the DBFZ pro scene's own version of Goku and Vegeta.

The PGRZ ranking system was determined by a complex algorithm, in which the PG Stats team crunched the numbers on national and worldwide tournaments based on top player attendance and total number of entrants. A heavier weight was placed on tournaments following the May 8 patch. Locals were excluded, with the exception of the Summit of Power. After all the numbers were crunched, a player's results were listed as their Power Level. (For those curious, only the top six players had Power Levels of over 9000.)

The full PGRZ Top 10 (via Panda Global) are:

• 10. NyChrisG (Christopher Gonzalez)
• 9. ApologyMan (Vineeth Meka)
• 8. Supernoon (Steve Carbajal)
• 7. moke (Naoki Nakayama)
• 6. Dogura (Ryo Nozaki)
• 5. HookGangGod (Eduardo Deno)
• 4. Fenritti (Sho Shoji)
• 3. Kazunoko (Ryoya Inoue)
• 2. GO1 (Goichi Kushida)
• 1. SonicFox (Dominique McLean)

More information on the PGstats team's methods can be found on the Panda Global website. Next on the Dragon Ball FighterZ pro radar is SAGA 3: Ultimate Fighting Arena, the next Saga event for the Dragon Ball FighterZ World Tour.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?