Game news The end of this Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero tournament was a disaster, even the commentators didn’t know what to say during the match…
Published on 05/12/2024 at 5:35 p.m.
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Arena fighter is often seen by fighting game players as the poor child of the genre, the fault of titles that are often insufficiently balanced to be considered “serious”. The latest Dragon Ball Sparking Zero tournament organized by Bandai seems in any case to prove them right…
A tournament with some subtleties
Dragon Ball Sparking Zero was undoubtedly one of the biggest releases of the year. Highly anticipated by fans of Dragon Ball and those nostalgic for Dragon Ball Budokai Tenkaichithe game propelled itself among the best sellers of the moment upon its release. If players may have complained about certain bugs and balancing issues, Bandai Namco has promised to support their production by regularly providing updates and additional content. Probably galvanized by popular enthusiasm, Bandai Namco revealed the organization of an official tournament in November 2024 on Dragon Ball Sparking Zero more in a somewhat particular format.
Indeed, the competition would see 9 “online qualifiers” in 9 different regions (East and West of the United States, United Kingdom, Mexico, Spain, Italy, Germany, France and Japan) as well as 7 tournaments which will take place in physics at the on the occasion of Battle Hour in Los Angeles on January 18. A total of 16 players will emerge from this long process to finally compete in finals with equally complicated rules, based on drastic character restrictions with a character chosen by the organizer for each player, to which said player can add a second character from a list of 40 other possible ones.
Don’t blame the player, blame the game
Started on November 16, the competition reached, with its French stage on November 30, its first controversy. Indeed, during the final between Hilliasteur and Shiryuu, the two players found themselves flying around the field in an almost anarchic manner.taking advantage of the androids’ unlimited ki to be able to avoid the opponent without running out of ki. An unusual situation, although far from inexplicable, which even led the tournament commentators to stop all commentary on the action. What followed was not only a return to order of the players, invited to “play seriously”then, after Shiryuu’s victory, a change in the tournament rules as well as the disqualification of the two finalists, allowing DrastreSparking to move from third to first place.
Since then, a long debate has ensued between players thinking that it is up to Bandai to take responsibility for the consequent lack of balancing of its game and those thinking rather that the players should have played “seriously”, even though there is nothing in the rules. doesn’t stop them from playing the way they want. Regardless of the camp, such an event, and especially the damaging decision to disqualify the two players, demonstrates the difficulty in managing a real tournament on a game far from being designed for competition. Already limited by fairly drastic restrictions on character choice, the publisher seems not to recognize that the very balancing of its Sparking Zero favors this type of tactictactics which will obviously be used by players during high-stakes tournaments as is systematically the case in all competitive games.
