Official Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero Tournament Is an Unsurprising and Unmitigated Disaster | Push Square

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Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero is not a competitive fighting game by design. Its colossal character roster is purposefully unbalanced, its mechanics are abusable at almost any level, and many of its underlying systems are built for spectacle instead of technical depth.

So when Bandai Namco announced 'The Dramatic Showdown' — an official tournament series for the game — eyebrows were raised. Was the publisher really going to try and pass Sparking! Zero off as some kind of competitive fighter?

We're not sure that was ever the intention — the whole thing feels more like an attempt to simply prolong the title's popularity ahead of promised DLC announcements. But still, the tournament is going ahead, and qualifiers are already underway.

One of these qualifying competitions has undermined the entire idea, however. The online qualifier for France resulted in a comical — and borderline embarrassing — grand finals match in which the one of the two finalists simply stalled their opponent to an extreme degree.

Basically, there are gameplay mechanics that can be exploited — like vertical flying — so that you don't have to deal with high-damage combos, or specific character skills that are deemed overpowered. Naturally, this kind of keep-away tactic turns the game into a chore — and it's incredibly boring to watch, which obviously isn't ideal for a public-facing event.

It gets to a point where the commentators just stop commentating — and we find it hard to blame them.

Likewise, you can't really blame the players for this shameless display — they're making use of mechanics that are present in an arena fighter that was never designed with such a competition in mind.

We've timestamped the climactic match here:

Even further beyond

The tournament has sparked (no pun intended) waves of criticism towards Sparking! Zero, with many players intensifying their cries for additional balance updates. Indeed, it'll be interesting to see if Bandai Namco actually makes any adjustments to the