(tinkling tune) - [Narrator] "Drgon Ball: Sparking! ZERO" is coming soon, and I'll be honest, we've seen the comments, we know it's the game we haven't talked about enough on Gameranx. So, today, we're changing that.
We're talking about 10 things you need to know about the game before it releases. Starting off at number 10. You gotta know that the "Budokai Tenkaichi" gameplay is back.
The "Tenkaichi" games on the PS2 were awesome. Everyone has their favorite, but for us, "Tenkaichi 3" with this massive roster and deep well of game modes just made it awesome. These games in general didn't have the most in depth and complex combat systems, but what they did have was, like, a fighting system that actually made it feel like you were in a battle from "Drgon Ball", flying all over the place, shooting blast, destroying the environment.
These games captured the essence of the power of "Drgon Ball" in a way that like a traditional tournament fighter really couldn't. So, if you're unaware, the "Budokai Tenkaichi" series, which isn't actually related to the "Budokai" series in any way, it was just Atari's way of piggybacking on that game's popularity at the time. In Japan, these games were called "Drgon Ball Z Sparking", and that's why this new game is called "Sparking!
ZERO". It's reverting the series back to its original Japanese game, which is good, because "Budokai Tenkaichi" is a lot. These games have more in combat with arena fighters, if you're at all familiar with those.
You've got a third person over the shoulder camera, and full 360-degree movement. Combat mechanics are more streamlined, so everyone has the same inputs for the most part, but they all have unique abilities and mechanics. Fidelity to the source material is emphasized over game balance sometimes.
The most powerful guys in the series are going to be tougher and do more damage than the weaker characters. This isn't like fighters where there's some attempt at like making the fighter roster balanced in some way. Like earlier versions of Goku are much weaker than super Saiyan God Goku.
Dr Wheelo is gonna have a bad time against Majin Buu. You get the idea. In some ways, the gameplay feels closer to a sports combat game, because it's more about mechanics than a traditional fighter.
It's just way more flashy than any sports game. There are so many abilities and systems in this series that's just there because it's cool and it's fun. Like how characters can transform and power up, or unleash literally world destroying attacks that completely change the environment.
Everything these games do is to be fun, accessible, and cool as hell. They're games that take some time adjusting to get used to, because even if they're close to arena fighters in style, they still play very differently from most of those games, but once you get the flow down, there's nothing else quite like 'em. The old games were so much fun.
The next gen ones, not as much. But from everything we've seen of this new entry in the series, it looks like it's sticking closer to those classic older games while making a few appreciated changes that should hopefully make the combat more fun and dynamic. Now, at number nine, the roster.
If you're a "Drgon Ball" head, this is the stuff you wanna hear. "Tenkaichi 3" has an absurd roster of over 150 fighters, but this game is gonna easily top it with a starting lineup of 182 fighters total, counting the pre-order bonus character, but not counting the planned DLC characters, which will bring the total playable characters in the game to over 200. This lineup draws from the entire history of "Drgon Ball", bringing in pretty much everybody of significance from "Drgon Ball Z", including all their various forms.
You can't have a "Drgon Ball" game without a gobsmacking amount of Gokus, and this game does not disappoint. If our count is correct, there are 17 different Gokus. That's more Goku than many full fighting game rosters.
That's as many as in "Street Fighter II" if you count Akuma, and we're not counting fusions here, just the guys literally called Goku. Well not Goku Black, he's like a different character kinda. Anyway, okay, so what actually counts as a Goku anymore is open to interpretation, but the point here is that there's a lot of Gokus.
They go all the way back to teen Goku from the original "Drgon Ball", and bring it full circle with the newest version of Goku with the pre-order DLC, which has "Drgon Ball DAIMA"'s kid version of the character, which is different from "Drgon Ball GT"'s kid version. Look, I know this series is confusing. I know a lot had to brush up on a lot of this stuff, but just stick with me.
For us, the most exciting thing about this game is the new characters that are showing up. The series originally ended back in 2011, 2 years before "Battle of the Gods" continued the story, and with "Super" running for as long as it has, there's, like, a whole cast of characters showing up here that never appeared in the previous games. The game's cast primarily goes up through the new tournament of power in "Drgon Ball Super", ending with characters from "Superhero" who are showing up as DLC.
Say, what You will about "Super"'s quality, but many of these guys should make for fun characters to play as. There are some deep cuts here and some surprising additions, but most surprising of all is that the game is gonna include a ton of stuff from "Drgon Ball GT", which is apparently still canon. It's just considered an alternate universe now that "Super" has become, quote unquote, "The real follow-up to 'Drgon Ball Z'.
" Another fun surprise is that every bad guy from the "Drgon Ball Z" movies are in this as well, including both the super and the old versions of Broly. Seems like they got a lot for every different type of fan, new and old. Is anything missing?
No Mercenary Tao and a general lack of original "Drgon Ball" characters. It's really just teen Goku and Master Roshi, but with a roster this big and deep, there are acceptable losses, I guess, there. Next over at number eight.
With more and more games going online only with their multiplayer, it's nice to get some kind of confirmation that this game will have split screen, so you and your friends can play together on a single TV if you want. The in-person experience is perfect for these types of games, especially ones that have a lot of pickup and play appeal, but there's one big problem with the split screen that has to be addressed here. According to the developers, while the game does allow you to play together locally on a single screen, you're limited to only one map, the Hyperbolic Time Chamber.
You know the one that's just set in like a big blank, white void. It's this training stage of these games. That is weird.
That sucks, because half of the fun of these battles is how you can completely destroy everything around you and fly all over the place. Battles can start in one place, then go up high in the sky, then deep underwater, then in the middle of a canyon or a city. The expansive stages make this feel like less of a generic fighting game and more like this titanic super hero brawl.
You know, the whole reason we talk about why we love this game in the first place in like the first point, the levels and the destructibility are awesome. So it's disappointing to hear that it seems like you can't do any of that playing split screen. This is specific, I know only a small portion of this audience even cares about it, but it's something that was special.
Hopefully, they update it or patch it and add more levels. I don't know, but I don't wanna be stuck with my friends playing in the most boring stage. Next at number seven, it's been over a decade since this series bowed out originally, and at that point, it was becoming pretty obvious that some of its gameplay systems needed some updating.
That's what "Sparking! ZERO" intends to do. They wanna make something that's like the original games but better.
At least that's the plan, and from what we've read, it seems like they're taking some steps in the right direction. For one thing, movement speed has been dramatically increased across the board. So now, just like moving around is as fast when you hold down the dash button in the original games.
The old dash button is now used for the short dash, a little burst of speed that's just useful for closing distances or avoiding attacks. The other major addition is this new skill counter. As you fight, you earn these points which can be spent to perform special abilities, many which tie into the game's new comeback mechanics.
There are two abilities that allow for easy reversals if you spend skill count. There's the revenge counter where you can attack in the middle of an opponent's turn. You still take damage, but you can interrupt a combo string and retaliate with your own.
That's nice. Along with the revenge counter, though, there's this Super Perception, which is basically a command counter in a fighting game. You trigger it before an opponent's attack to trigger an automatic counter move that will avoid damage and give you the upper hand.
From all the footage we have seen, "Sparking! ZERO" looks like a faster paced version of the old games with all the original mechanics still intact, like the sparking system, and the dragon dash, and all that stuff that made those games unique and special. We hope those new changes make for an even better game, but right now, considering that we haven't actually played it, we haven't gotten our hands on the game, we can't say how it'll play.
We don't know how it'll shake out, but keep your eyes peeled for more videos. Next at number six. You need to know that there is no character creator.
If you want that, you'll have to stick with the "Xenoverse" games, but there is a customization menu where you can change out costumes and add accessories to the fighter. So yes, on top of having 180-ish, like, or more characters, this game also has multiple different costumes per character. In the example given, they show Goku in many states of undress.
Can these costumes carry over between different versions of a character? I don't know, and we're not sure how you unlock them. All we know is that they're in the game, so every permutation of a character that appears in the story mode is available to play as if you want.
One interesting additional little bit of info that we found on the game's beginner guide on the website, along with full outfits and some little accessories, like a halo or a scouter, you can give fighters ability capsules that enhance their stats in some way. This is a holdover from the old games, but we're not sure how it's gonna work in this one. They sound like something that could easily be turned into some kind of annoying pay to win item sold for real cash, but so far, it seems like this game is committed to the old school style, so hopefully, this is just an in-game item that you can only get as a reward from playing the game.
Next over at number five. The story mode of "Sparking! ZERP" is called Episode Battle, and in it you play through the defining fights of the "Drgon Ball" series by playing through a specific character's story, and for this, there are eight characters total.
Half are what you'd expect. There's Goku, Vegeta, Gohan, Piccolo, but the other four are a little different, letting you play as future Trunks, Frieza, Goku Black, and Jiren. Rather than just being a straightforward story mode, these episodes give you choices that affect the outcome of the story.
So when playing as Goku, you can decide to go it alone against Raditz, which then changes what happens next. Sometimes, these stories can apparently lead to different encounters, and send the stories spiraling in different directions, but sometimes, they just lead back to the original path, making a small change but not really affecting things. There are obvious choices you can make between battles, but sometimes, things change depending on how you resolve a fight, like if the character you're playing as wins a battle they're meant to lose, that can change things by quite a lot.
There are other more hidden triggers as well, which are even harder to figure out, because, I mean, at this point we've all seen the story of "Drgon Ball Z" play out 100 times already in 100 different video games. So, we appreciate that this game lets us possibly do some things a little bit different. Also, it's worth noting, it seems like the scenarios are gonna be varied in length, you know, depending on a character, like obviously, Goku is around the longest, so his is gonna take a while.
Now over at number four. Another interesting new mode are these custom battles, which give you the tools to make your own dramatic "Drgon Ball" throw downs. It reminds me of the story editor from those old "WWE" games.
You can kind of piece together and edit cut scenes for pre and post battles, and special events and conditions that need to be triggered during the fight, add music change, the character's appearance. There seems like there's a pretty decent selection of options here. These scenarios can be shared online.
So, anyone else can go into this mode and download custom battles from other players, provided they're able to beat the battle themselves to prove that it's not impossible. Like a "Mario Maker" situation. This sounds like a fun idea, and from what they've shown, the event editor allows for some pretty complex rules and scenarios.
You're still just building a single battle. And while there are options for subtitles, it looks like you can only use phrases provided by the game. You can't write your own dialogue, which does kind of limit how crazy people can go with this, but still, we're just looking forward to jumping in and seeing what kind of weird stuff people more creative than us can come up with.
There's gonna be some pre-made custom fights you can check out as well, apparently. Just, really, with the massive roster here, there's so much potential for people to have fun, and we're excited to see what they cook up. Now down at number three.
Tournaments have always been a big part of these games, and they're back in "Sparking! ZERO" with some twists on the old formula. How they do work remains the same, fundamentally.
You have a character, you enter a bracket, and try to beat everyone else to become number one, but there are a few different types of tournaments to pick from. There are six pre-made tournaments, like the World Tournament where landing on the ground outside the ring counts as a loss or the Yamcha games where anything goes and it's just chaos. The rules change every match.
The game also lets you make your own tournament with your own rules, which can be played both online and offline. Now, we've already mentioned the unfortunate state of offline play in the game, but it's at least going to support full online play. There's battle mode, which is just your standard online mode, and ranked mode for more serious hardcore players.
If the game will actually draw the attention of serious pro fighting game players, I don't know, but at least the online options seem all right, if a little basic. Don't expect like complex rollback netcode. The game doesn't have it, probably can't have it, and just because the nature of the gameplay, you know.
It's not like a regular fighting game. There are too many possible inputs, so rollback doesn't work. At least that's what it seems like, according to speculation online.
Now down at number two. So there's only about 100 fighters available at the start of the game out of the 182 total, which left us wondering, how are you supposed to unlock these guys? Well, it sounds like there's gonna be a few ways.
According to the developers, some are unlocked by completing Episode Battles, some you get from finishing the bonus battles, and others are simply unlocked from the in-game store using Zeni, the currency that's been in these games since the PlayStation 2 days. Zeni isn't just for unlocking new fighters, it's also used for the costumes we mentioned, the accessories, and the ability capsules. That's not the only way you unlock these characters either though, depending on the pre-order version you buy, certain characters will automatically unlock two.
Not everyone, just certain characters. It's questionable stuff like that that has us concerned about how monetized the game will be, but right now, there's no word on possible microtransactions. We just hope that whatever they do, it doesn't end up interfering with the experience.
It's one of those things that could end up being totally benign and not that bad, or awful and filled with terrible microtransactions. If it's just some DLC characters, fine, whatever. But if they lock lots of characters that are already in the game behind a lot of really tedious grinding that they, like, intentionally made worse to drive people to buy currency, then that's not cool.
Bandai has gone kind of either way in the past, but with a big high profile game like this, we're hoping they curtail their worst instincts and just try to deliver the best possible straightforward video game experience. And speaking of that type of stuff, down at number one, let's get the housekeeping out of the way. "Drgon Ball: Sparking!
ZERO" is releasing worldwide on October 10th, 2024 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, S, and Steam. This will be the first "Budokai Tenkaichi" game to release on PC, which should be exciting for the mods alone, even for PlayStation games. The older games in the series are still popular with modders who have done some really hilarious, awesome, cool, crazy stuff with the old game, so we're really expecting them to bring some of that energy to "Sparking!
ZERO" here. Now, if you pre-order the base game, you get the "Drgon Ball Daima" Goku for free, along with six character early unlocks, which are three different forms of two characters. These don't cost any extra, you just have to pre-order the game.
That's the standard edition. Then there's the Deluxe Edition, which comes with the season pass that is apparently going to add over 20 playable characters from the "Superhero" movie and the upcoming "Daima" anime series. All that and they're doing the early access thing.
Get the Deluxe Edition, you get three days early access to kind of beta test the game for everybody else. Well, one other thing, you can also summon Shenron, which is completely unexplained. My only guess is that the game does something like the old games where you can collect the dragon balls in game and do certain things, and then if you get all them, then you can summon the dragon and get a list of things to wish for, like maybe a bunch of in-game money or maybe an unlockable character.
Maybe it's something like that. We're spit-balling, but there's also this Ultimate Edition, which costs even more. It adds in a cosmetic pack and lets you summon Super Shenron, which I assume is just better wishes or something.
The most important thing is that you get the season pass and three days early access for both of those versions. So now, it's really up to you how much you're willing to spend, if anything, really. But hey, those are 10 things you need to know about the upcoming "Drgon Ball: Sparking!
ZERO". It seems like a pretty exciting one, so let us know what you think in the comments. We'd love to hear anything you got about the game, any memories playing the originals, any expectations, any hopes, dreams, fears for this one.
Let us know. If you liked this video and you like talking games with us every single day, and maybe getting a little informed with these, clicking on the like button helps us. We'd really appreciate that.
But either way, thank you for watching, and we'll see you guys next time.
