Like many others this game has strongly caught my attention but unfortunately I am clinically rubbish at fighting games. I will give online a go but suspect it won't have the legs for me that it does for others as I am left behind by the skill curve. That said I wonder how the singleplayer stuff has been recently for this dev?

I don't expect Mortal Kombat levels of stuff but is likely to the very standard "arcade" "training" and maybe AI versus or does Arc tend to put in more?

I'm very out of the loop for this genre so please fill me in!

There's also very good training and mission modes in GG. I'd say it might still be a notch down compared to NRS games, but it's still better than SFV and Tekken 7.

BlazBlue and Persona Arena have quite extensive visual novel-esque story modes with fights peppered throughout. The Guilty Gear Xrd story mode is basically a movie, they took out the fights but it's all in-engine and animated instead of the character portraits conversing of the aforementioned games.

Beyond that, there will probably be a few other modes here and there. Xrd has M.O.M. Mode, where you do successive fights against the AI and each match will have different modifiers and there's actually a small level of customisation to it. Your taunt button becomes an assignable attack with a cool down, you can earn new moves to put in that slot and you can drop points into stats and stuff.

Actually since its Dragon Ball, it'll probably use the Saiyan saga or Frieza saga for it's story but for some sort of ladder mode, probably something that akins to the Cell Games saga which might play like Persona Ultimate Suplex Hold ladder.

It seems like the game is being built to be accessible (a lot of potent tools are attached to just single button-presses rather than requiring directional inputs and whatnot), which should mean that if you can get friends to play then you'll be able to do cool shit together without labbing things out extensively. How things go online will depend on whether casuals stick around in critical mass -- popular fighting games tend to bring in a flood of beginners to play against, but when the ranks thin out you may get murdered. ArcSys does also seems to make decent single-player content.

Generally, though, the reason people suck at fighting games isn't because they lack innate "skill" or reactions, but because they don't understand the theory and/or they don't put in the practice to make pressure strings and movement and the like second-nature. A lot of people over-emphasize drilling combos, or think their opponent is out-reacting them in ways that are actually humanly impossible and have more to do with their opponent stringing together good educated guesses. This isn't to pressure or begrudge you if you don't want to learn to play fighting games well -- it's a time/effort commitment, no doubt about that -- but if you were interested but you've talked yourself out of it because you think you're just bad, then there are places you can go to get the knowledge to overcome that.

It would be good if ArcSys put that kind of knowledge in the tutorials, though -- or better yet, the story mode. Their more recent tutorials don't seem bad, but it's kinda rare for fighting games to teach you about things like unreactability, frame traps, yomi, etc.

It would be cool if they just ripped all of the challenge/tutorial stuff from GG. Arc is usually pretty good and consistent at that. For big main story modes, I hope they also copy guilty gear and just put in a 3 hour long anime. The visual novel type stuff seems like a waste in that engine. The other Arc games usually don't have great SP stuff outside of challenges/tutorials, which are pretty practical, and their weird pseudo-rpg mode. Neither are as varied or approachable as the stuff you see in MK and Injustice.