Injustice Analysis: Zatanna

It is finally time for Injustice: Gods Among Us to release its most recent DLC character: Zatanna!  As always, it cannot possibly hurt to take a look at what she is capable of before she becomes commonplace, so a quick run-through of the capabilities she shows off in her release trailer is in order.

Right off the bat we see Zatanna use a teleport to move from directly in front of her opponent to directly behind, dodging Grundy’s initial offensive.  She also teleports later in the video what looks like a set distance, giving her some tactical flexibility with the escape/gap-closer.  Much later in the video she even displays an ability to use this teleport while in mid-air, creating all kinds of potential placement shenanigans.

She has a basic projectile in the form of throwing her top hat, showing an ability to angle it upwards to catch someone jumping as well.  She uses a quick three-hit combo launched in mid-air from a kick, and shortly after shows a close-range fire-breathing attack that mostly seems to interrupt her opponent.

Much more interestingly, she adopts what seems to be a stance change, putting on her hat and pulling out her magic wand.  She immediately shows a juggle-capable knockup as part of a combo, adding another knockup at a farther range to keep the combo going a bit longer.  She shows that she can fire projectiles either straight, diagonally upwards, or along the ground, although the ground projectile’s speed is low.

At the same time as using a slow-moving but very large fireball, Zatanna shows us one last extra possibility for her teleport, crossing the entire battlefield to arrive behind her foe right as the fireball reaches him, guaranteeing a hit and combo as a result.

As a Quan Chi player in Mortal Kombat, I appreciate where she uses a move highly reminiscent of his trance attack, holding her foe in place and making him take several slow steps towards her, leaving him entirely open to her attacks.  She also actually avoids Grundy’s ultimate attack by using a move splitting her into three transparent duplicates.  Her opponent’s attacks seem to go right through her during this, raising questions about what sort of limitations it has.

Zatanna’s own finisher sees her drag her foe off the battlefield, to her own mystical realm so she can bind them in her words before locking them into magic geometry and hurling them to the ground.

Fittingly for a magician, Zatanna looks to have some very curious tricks, including a great deal of mobility and battlefield control.  We don’t have long to wait to see how well she delivers on that promise.