Dragon Ball Sparking Zero may be set to be a 2024 highlight.
Okami13 shared an insightful observation about the game on Twitter:
“Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO reaches over 90,000 concurrent Steam players in its first day of Early Access.
That’s already higher than fighting games like Street Fighter 6 (70K) and Tekken 8 (49K).
Currently you have to spend at least $100 to play.”
We checked in on Dragon Ball Sparking Zero’s SteamDB page, and we can confirm that it reached a peak concurrent player count of 91,005 players last October 8, 2024 on 20 UTC. That would have been October 8, 2 PM on Pacific Standard Time. SteamDB also indicates that it has received 91.6 % positive user review ratings, from a total of 9.835 user reviews.
Just last week, we reported that the game earned a Metacritic score of 84. That does put this title far out of reach from 2024’s highest rated games, which includes Dragon’s Dogma 2, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, and the recently released Metaphor Refantazio. But it’s still an exceptionally high rating at a time when most game releases have turned out disappointing.
Dragon Ball Sparking Zero is a throwback for fans from 20 years ago, which was not the era of the NES, but the PlayStation 2. This is the latest game in the Dragon Ball Sparking franchise, which was localized in the West with the perplexingly more Japanese name of Dragon Ball Budokai Tenkaichi. But this is where we have to explain a bit of Dragon Ball’s 2000s video game history.
There was an earlier fighting game series called Dragon Ball Budokai, made by Dimps for the PlayStation 2. This was the first time gamers got to play Goku and his friends in glorious 3D stages, but it still had conventional 2D fighting game mechanics. Dragon Ball Sparking, AKA Dragon Ball Budokai Tenkaichi, is a new series made by Spike in the second half of the PlayStation 2’s lifespan. This game was a 3D arena fighter that featured full 3D movement and combat mechanics. That included a lock on targeting system, simplified controls, and additional layers of ornate mechanics.
Atari published both Dragon Ball Budokai and Dragon Ball Budokai Tenkaichi in the West, and some fans speculate they deliberately wanted fans to think these were the same franchise. In any case, with Bandai Namco now publishing the game, they can make its original Japanese name the new standard, in the same way that Yakuza is now being rebranded as Like A Dragon.
Whatever name you called it by, the Dragon Ball Sparking series is loved by fans for its superior presentation, retelling the series’ beloved storylines, and also for raising the bar with its ungodly character rosters. Dragon Ball Sparking Zero is set to be a fitting tribute to the series recently departed creator, Akira Toriyama, and it may herald the return of fighting games that aren’t made for the FGC, as much as they’re meant for hardcore anime fans.
