We’re now about half way through Bandai Namco’s Dramatic Showdown Tournament, a special series of events featuring the new Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero that will end with an exciting international finals bracket in Los Angeles in January.
France, arguably the most competitive region when it comes to Sparking Zero right now, played its online qualifier over the weekend. This culminated in a highly-controversial grand finals set that exposed the fact that the current most effective strategy involves spamming evasive maneuvers to time your opponent out. This alone turned the tournament’s climax into a bit of a farce, but competitor statements following the finals only added to the controversy.
Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero released back on October 11 and has already rolled out one emergency balance patch to nerf some unintended Yajirobe abilities. Expectations that this 180+ character roster will be at all balanced for competitive fighting game tournament play this early in the game’s life (or perhaps, ever) are understandably minuscule.
With its single elimination format, pre-selected character picks for the final bracket, and lack of prize pool thus far, Bandai Namco’s promotional Dramatic Showdown Tournament circuit does not smack of traditional competition, either.
That said, players are still giving Sparking Zero their all as they rush to figure out optimal strategies for winning, and that effort was put on clear display during the weekend’s French online qualifier. Competitors Hilliasteur and Shiryxu wound up as the event’s two finalists.
Both chose teams consisting of Android 19 and Dr. Gero (also known as Android 20), two characters that notably have infinite access to the game’s universal “ki” mechanic, which is essentially a meter required for specific attacks and movements. One ki-dependent maneuver is a speedy dash that can cause characters to zip up, down, left, or right, and spamming this dash makes you nigh-impossible to hit.
As grand finals started, a Dr. Gero mirror quickly turned into a dash fest as both competitors immediately and incessantly spammed this maneuver. Commentators Tyrant and Jake Ryan quickly noticed the peculiar action and began remarking about the lack of interaction, clearly wondering if this was an instance of collusion or some kind of jest. After about two minutes without a single clash, Bandai decided to cut away from the gameplay and only feature the commentators as they filled the next 8 minutes with casual Dragon Ball talk.
As it turns out, both players were approaching the game with the most effective known strategy right now: spam dash until you get an opportunity to land a single hit, then evade until you win via timer scam. Though we didn’t get to see it, the first round wound up going to Shiryxu, who presumably scored a single hit at some point during the 10 minute fight.
According to Hilliasteur on X, there were some interactions between players and Bandai Namco tournament organizers between the first and second game during the best of three grand finals set. Here is what Hilliasteur had to say on X about the interaction:
Hilliasteur proceeded to change characters and lose via time out in the second bout, making Shinryxu the victor. The French champion then promptly took to X to post footage of his win with the hashtag “#FIXSPARKINGZERO” prominently displayed:
I WON BY JUST RUNNING WITH ANDROIDS #FIXSPARKINGZERO https://t.co/qIeme4v9V8
— ShiryxuOnTwitch (@SHIRYXU) November 25, 2024
Commentator Tyrant took to his own live stream Monday morning to talk about the controversy from his own point of view. He was quick to decry finger pointing in any direction, noting that this kind of happening is common amid fighting games, especially so soon after launch.
“You can’t put blame on anybody,” he stated. “This is in the game, this strategy is there for everybody to use. There’s nothing in the rule set that says ‘stalling for time out is against the rules,’ or anything like that. That is what it is. That’s just the game,” concluded Tyrant.
Bandai Namco announced an additional balance patch was coming to Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero in December after the conclusion of the Dramatic Showdown Tournament online preliminaries. We have no information about what this patch will specifically attend to, though this timer scam potential is likely now a top priority.
You can view the grand finals for yourself via Bandai Namco’s VOD below. The video contains the online event in its entirety, but should skip you right to the start of grand finals around the 6:13:35 mark:
We have reached out to Bandai Namco, Hilliasteur, and Shiryxu for comment, but as of this article’s publish time, we have not heard back.