YMMV / DNF Duel

• Awesome Art: The visuals for the game are gorgeous, from the smooth and flowy animations, to the character designs, and the amazing backgrounds that well adapts from the source material. Longtime fans of Dungeon Fighter Online and newcomers alike were stunned at how the game looks.
• Awesome Music:
  • "Brawl of Hendon Myre", the Hendon Myre stage theme, was widely considered the best theme heard during the open beta, consistently wowing players, streamers and audiences alike. For added nostalgia, veteran DFO players may recognize it as an arrangement of "Silver Night", a dungeon theme from the earlier years of DFO.
  • "Troublemaker", the Moonlight Tavern stage theme, is also considered to be a stand-out in the soundtrack, due to its energy being very similar to tracks in the earlier Guilty Gear games, to the point it's been used in a lot of trailers. Its slower pace compared to the old DFO PVP theme it's derived from also makes it stand out.
  • "Primal Wonder", a rock arrangement of "Tayberrs - Fallen Paradise" used in the game's first official trailer, was widely praised for its catchy melody.
• Fan Nickname:
  • "Korean Jam" or "Jam's cousin" for the Striker. Since she's a toned martial artist with long brown hair in an ArcSys game, comparisons to Jam Kuradoberi were pretty much immediate.
  • "Korean Dante" for the Ranger, due to his moveset heavily resembling the moves of Dante from the Devil May Cry series, along with his demeanor. It helps that Dante's most iconic fighting game, Marvel vs. Capcom 3, was developed by Eighting. In a similar vein, Hitman is often called "Old Man Dante" and "Daddy/Uncle Dante" due to having a similar fighting style and moveset to Dante in MvC3.
  • "Korean Maximilian" and "Dante Badguy" for the Troubleshooter, the first due to bearing a resemblance to Fighting Game Community streamer Maximilian Dood, and the latter due to his fighting style resembling a mix of Dante's shotgun moves and Sol Badguy's sword techniques.
    • A relatively simple mod gives him a Palette Swap with blonde hair, a goatee and a red shirt, similar to the illustrated self-portrayal Max often uses in his thumbnails, even including a few minor touches to further cement it as Max. The mod eventually reached its logical conclusion with Max stepping in to provide voice acting to complete it.
  • "Korean Vergil" for Ghostblade, due to his general demeanor and use of a katana being very similar to Vergil.
  • The Launcher is referred to as "Rose" by some players, after her Canon Name as a Guest Fighter in Elsword.
• Fountain of Memes: While Crusader is by no means a minor character in the original Dungeon Fighter Online, being one of the game's three Support Party Members, newcomers to the franchise brought in through this game as well as the fighting game community immediately took a liking to him for his distinct character design and interesting moveset. And as his popularity rose, so too did the memes.
• Friendly Fandoms: With the Devil May Cry fanbase, as evidenced by the several DMC-related Fan Nicknames used for the Ranger, Hitman, Troubleshooter and Ghostblade, or by viewers who quickly noticed how the Ranger has a move heavily resembling Dante's Rainstorm. That's not even counting the DMC-related mods the shared fanbase is trying to create for this game. It also helped that Eighting co-developed DNF Duel as they did with Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and its Ultimate edition (which had Devil May Cry characters).
• Game-Breaker:
  • DNF Duel is a textbook example of the 8ing philosophy of "if everyone is broken, nobody is" when it comes to fighting games. Virtually every character in the game has at least one hilariously busted move that, in almost any other game, would have been nerfed to oblivion; to wit, when players complained about some characters being broken in the first beta, the second beta responded by buffing everyone else.
  • Deflection Wall is one of Crusader's best moves, and possibly one of the most infamous moves in the entire game. On use, Crusader summons a magic cross that pops up from below the opponent; if not blocked, the attack pops the opponent toward the Crusader's direction. What makes this skill truly terrifying is that once on the field, Deflection Wall functions as a corner, allowing Crusader to effectively put his opponent into the corner whenever he wants. Combined with his other offensive tools, this allows him to immediately put his opponent into disadvantage and even start one-button wall combos.
  • Inquisitor. Two words: Burning Wheel. For 90 MP, Inquisitor summons a massive flaming wheel that takes up half the screen, lasts for roughly 5 seconds, and hits multiple times, also igniting the opponent if they are debuffed by Fledge's Essence. It deals incredible damage on hit, and it doesn't really matter if it gets blocked, as it forces the opponent to stay in blockstun unless they want to get punished and inflicts immense chip damage and easy Guard Breaks. In addition, the Inquisitor has full control after the wheel appears, meaning that once it's out, she can rush in and start wailing on the target, either by taking advantage of the aerial juggle or punishing them for blocking the attack with a blockstring or a grab. Its only real downsides are its easily punishable startup and being an MP hog.
  • Screw individual moves, Swift Master is extremely powerful from top to bottom. He's loaded down with some of the best normals in the game, excellent frame data, wide-reaching and rewarding disjoints, and an extremely versatile kit to boot. He has projectiles, a mana move that gives him four hits of armor, a wind orb that pulls opponents in and makes his okizeme terrifying, and mana-efficient high damage combos to boot. If any particular part of his kit stands out, it has to be Storm Strike, which is a fullscreen, plus-on-block, projectile destroying combo starter that can even end combos in hard knockdown for okizeme. In a game where the average character is usually considered very strong, Swift Master stands head and shoulders above his peers. At the time of launch, he is believed to be the uncontested single best character in the game, and he's earned it.
• High-Tier Scrappy
  • Swift Master, a character with disgustingly long combos that can chop off massive amounts of health off any interaction and keep their opponent in the air to make their combos true and prevent teching out. Especially hated for their That One Attack, Storm Strike, a Charge Attack that reaches fullscreen, is plus on block, easily punishes whiffs and zoners, and functions as both a combo starter and combo extender. It got to the point where DNF Duel's first major patch was almost nothing but Swift Master nerfs in order to bring him down to manageable levels.
  • Hitman is another high tier powerhouse. He's armed to the teeth with a variety of strong, long-ranged attacks and can convert virtually any hit he gets into pressure of some sort, blocked or otherwise. Many of his moves push the opponent just out of reach so they have difficulty punishing him, allowing him to either continue pressure in a number of ways or simply wait for the opponent to open themselves up trying to retaliate, in the process resetting things back into his favor. All of this on top of having one of the best Awakenings in the game. It grants him a rather simple bonus: a new follow-up attack for all of his Mana Skills. The problem? This move is plus on block, leads to either a guaranteed juggle or stagger depending on what move it came after on hit, and due to both of these properties is a win-win situation for Hitman any time he uses it, meaning he can use and abuse it freely whenever he feels like spending the Mana and his opponent has no choice but to deal with it.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: A few months after the game's release, well after the hype died down, the people who stuck with the game lamented the fact that after clearing Story Mode, there's basically nothing to do other than climb the online ranked ladder. The radio silence regarding the possibility of future DLC characters since the game's release only made these sentiments worse. It was alleviated, however, with the announcement of a fairly large balance patch and the reveal of Spectre as the game's first DLC character.
• Memetic Badass: As mentioned above, Crusader became a quick fan favorite after his reveal. The fact that his Deflect Wall, which was already highly reminiscent of Urien's infamous Aegis Reflector Super quickly got discovered as being cheesable, combined with the Crusaders prayer going viral led to him being considered a certified badass by the fandom.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Launcher so far has been the hardest hit victim of this. Despite her massive quantity of guns, her zoning options are subpar, forcing her to stay in a range that is less than ideal to function, and many of her moves struggle to break through guarding opponents and have glaring blind spots. Some characters can even punish her outright regardless of what buttons she's pushing by exploiting said blind spots, giving her many unfavorable matchups.
• Narm:
  • While "Grappler" is an acceptable class name for an MMORPG character, the fact that he's still called "Grappler" in Duel amused some fighting game fans since "grappler" also refers to an entire archetype of fighting game characters, making him the fighting game equivalent of A Dog Named "Dog".
  • A few players complained that the decision to stand by the original class names rather than assigning Canon Names to the cast makes them hard to take seriously when all we have to go by are descriptor titles. DFO fans, on the other hand, generally don't mind since referring to the characters by class name has been around since the start.
• Tainted by the Preview:
  • The first open beta for the game didn't make a good first impression for most people. While it's expected that servers would be down for a bit due to an excess of players, the lack of features made it look incomplete. No Training Mode, no online Quick-play matches, and the only CPU matches preventing you from pausing the game meant that players would be shouting "Guide Dang It!" as they're curbstomped into the ground if they weren't lucky enough to stumble upon someone of a similar skill level in a random lobby. The fact that it was held the same weekend as The King of Fighters XV second beta (which did have those features) makes the sting even worse. DNF Duel's second beta ultimately addressed none of these issues, which caused some casual players of the first beta to not even bother touching the second beta to avoid the deja vu.
  • The reveal of the game's systems, including "simple" commands (using single-direction inputs rather than full motions) and a block button caused some negative reaction from more hardcore fighting game players, who became worried that the game would be too simple and lacking in depth. More optimistic fans pointed out that a game being perceived as "simple" does not mean lack of depth, and that the game actively rewards traditional fighting game habits such as using command inputs for MP Skills and not using the block button to block.
  • In the weeks after the beta's conclusion, some players were worried about the rather lacking mixup game, a common expectation of other anime fighting games. Jump-in moves were somewhat slow and extremely risky due to the lack of midair blocking, making crossups relatively useless, and high/low mixups weren't particularly rewarding, relegating the metagame to guessing if/when the opponent will use a command grab. The few people that defended the game design pointed out that all of these factors make it fairly close to DFO's PVP meta (whether or not that was intentional by the developers), since there's no blocking of any kind (save for a select few classes, and even then there are still no traditional mixups) and the sole defensive options are Quick Rebound (DFO's version of a delayed wakeup) and super armor.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Some DFO players were particularly upset about the Launcher's design in Duel, preferring the more badass and hardened design of the original F. Launcher than the Mechanic-esque design they went with.
• Uncertain Audience: The likely reason why DNF Duel's competitive life didn't last too long. Dungeon Fighter Online is a popular game, but its core fans weren't willing to spend money on a fighting game, a fighting game without much single-player content at that. In terms of gameplay, DNF Duel has lots of crazy moves, but doesn't have the mobility that other "anime" style fighters like Guilty Gear -STRIVE- or the BlazBlue series have. Fighting game fans who prefer grounded fighting akin to Street Fighter were turned off by the huge moves and lack of balance. Adding to this trope was Nexon's poor communication with the fandom, leading to Duel's competitive scene dying off not too long after release, to the point where it wasn't included in Evo Japan 2023's or Evo 2023's main lineup.
• Unexpected Character:
  • When people speculated which Male Priest subclass would be selected for the base roster, it was initially assumed to be either Avenger or Monk, with Avenger being more likely based on the silhouette. Instead, it's the Crusader, a class that, while possessing a similar silhouette to the Avenger, is a Support Party Member in the original MMORPG. Suffice to say, many fans were surprised.
  • Ghostblade and Troubleshooter being announced surprised DFO fans since it was previously thought that the game would limit itself to one subclass per class and that two of the six (theorized) remaining slots would possibly go to Dark Knight and Creator. Ghostblade and Troubleshooter bucked that trend, opening the potential for more subclasses to make an entry as post-launch DLC.
  • The Witch was speculated to be the game's first (or only) female Mage representative for several months before and after the first beta, with some saying that her Fighting Clown style would make for an interesting gimmick. This was proven false with the box art reveal, prominently displaying an Enchantress instead, making her the second DFO Support Party Member in the roster.
  • Lore-savvy players were surprised to see the Lost Warrior (aka. Carloso's Fragment) on the box art, given that he was mostly a pre-Metastasis character that had virtually no plot relevance at the time and was later removed from the game after the Metastasis update, meaning most players of the current version have not seen or interacted with him at all.

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