Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero is going to be Smash Bros Ultimate of Dragon Ball games

The more I see roster announcements for Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero, the more I consider it to be the Super Smash Bros Ultimate of Dragon Ball games.

Every good fighting game needs a good roster of characters, both in terms of design and overall appeal. Dragon Ball games tend to have both in spades, but every time I watch new gameplay or a character reveal trailer for Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero I realise more and more just how impressive its roster is going to be, not even counting inevitable DLC expansions.

Check out Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero below

For those who didn’t play it, Sparking Zero’s predecessor Dragon Ball: Budokai Tenkaichi 3 featured an incredible 98 characters, 161 if you count all the different forms they could transform into. In comparison, Sparking Zero will have 164 characters including transformations, spanning early Dragon Ball Z all the way up to Dragon Ball Super.

While we haven’t seen the completed roster just yet, it’s looking like it’ll be the most comprehensive list of characters seen in a Dragon Ball game so far, and it’s giving me major Smash Bros vibes.

I’m sure we all remember where we were when we watched the trailer for Super Smash Bros Ultimate for Nintendo Switch. In previous entries there were the main-stays like Mario, Link, Kirby etc, but then there were the guest characters like Wolf, Mew-Two, Little-Mac and many more.

These guest characters differed from title-to-title, but then a trailer for Smash Bros Ultimate showed us character after character after character, many of whom we’d hadn’t seen in a game for a while. Eventually those three glorious words appeared on screen, “Everyone Is Here” and we couldn’t have been more hyped.

Nintendo

The trailers for Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero have told a similar story, showing off the main-stays like Goku, Vegeta, Broly, Frieza, all the characters you’d expect by now in one of these games.

However one of the most recent trailers, posted on 26 June, gave me that same “Everyone Is Here” vibe.

The trailer showed off multiple new characters that either fought with fists or swords as their primary method of attack, like Future Trunks, the Demon King Dabura and Jiren to name a few. Two characters that really stood out to me though were Yajirobe, a character who hasn’t been playable since Budokai Tenkaichi 3, and Anilaza, a Dragon Ball Super character that’s in the show for a single episode.

Bandai Namco Entertainment

Seeing two obscure characters like that inspired the belief that the full roster will include so many characters that we might not have expected to appear, and any that are missing will likely come through DLC packs.

In addition Dragon Ball Sparking Zero will feature various costumes for each character, some of which actually change the way certain characters attack. For example there’s a costume for Goku that gives him his Power Pole from the OG Dragon Ball series, which he’ll use during gameplay as opposed to his fists in the default outfit.

Of course fans like myself should be careful to temper expectations a tiny bit to avoid too much disappointment, for example I don’t think we’re going to see the farmer with a shotgun from the first Dragon Ball Z episode (though I’d love to be proven wrong).

Bandai Namco Entertainment

That being said I have high hopes for the final roster of characters, and based on the gameplay we’ve seen so far it’s clear that they’ll all feel unique rather than reskinned versions of each other, something that previous games like Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 have been criticised for.