Spike Chumsoft has revealed the full roster for Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero, and while most were losing their heads after finally seeing movie characters being confirmed (following the GT cast debut last week), others were infuriated by seeing Goku in his Dragon Ball Daima visual as one of the DLCs.
The final character trailer debuted earlier today, much to fans’ joy and dismay. They kept their promise, and now we have even more characters than in Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaichi 3. The PS2 game brought us 164 different playable characters while Sparking! Zero has a grand total of 182 in its base roster only. They all come from different iterations of the anime, including Z, GT, Super and its various movies.
DLCs promise to bump up these numbers even further. The only two confirmed DLC characters previously were Gamma 1 and Gamma 2 from the Super Hero movie. But this has now changed with the announcement of Goku (Mini), based on his new infant looks from the upcoming Dragon Ball Daima anime. He’s the mysterious bonus character obtained with pre-orders for the game. However, not all reactions are as good to his presence, as some fans deem it to be a lazy job of a DLC.
X user @BugDroidCell made their stance very clear, and many seem to agree with them. “Daima goku in sparking zero is such a ****ing cashgrab. All of his dialogues are just telling me to watch sparking zero.”, referring to a parody video made by themselves. The post was made a few days before the announcement, as leaks about the full roster were already circulating before being finally officialized with the latest trailer.
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As Daima Goku was later confirmed in Sparking! Zero, they doubled down on their negativity. “NOW THAT HES CONFIRMED WATCH HIM JUST ****ING CASHGRAB IN EVERY INTRO😭😭😭”, they quoted their own initial response, which has reached almost 4000 likes at the moment of the writing.
Others mentioned their wishes for different characters. “Daima Goku makes sense but I wish it either was an original character Toriyama made or someone more unique like Beelzebub/Arale/Tori-bot.”, mentioned Kringer on X. Arale was notorious in Tenkaichi 3 due to her unusual and hilariously huge power scale within the game, being able to break through giant characters’ (like Great Apes and full-power Broly) “Super Armor”, a rare ability to have in the game.
Not All Criticism Is Unjustified
There’s another important factor to consider when talking about this particular Goku’s presence. When the so-called mysterious character was announced, it was said to be a “character never seen before in a Dragon Ball” game. I mean, this is technically right. But it’s also a bit unfair, as people were hoping for some unique or different character.
Tenkaichi 3 had not only Arale, but other obscure but fun characters such as Devilman were also playable. This makes the Goku (Mini) reveal much less impactful, especially as we already knew that Daima was going to be a DLC. It’s still a case of people being let down for their own expectations, of course, but it’s still a bummer after all.
As for other upcoming DLC characters, nothing is confirmed just yet. However, the confirmed characters imply that we’ll see transformations like Beast Gohan and Orange Piccolo from the Super Hero movie down the line, as well as the rest of the Daima cast such as Vegeta (Mini). As people are still skeptical about Dragon Ball Daima, it’s easy to see why this could be looked upon with very bad eyes.
Characters like Super 17 and Pikkon are still nowhere to be seen, and people have also requested some other fan favorites such as Super Saiyan Bardock. Knowing that a good portion of the promised 20+ DLC characters are destined to promote an upcoming series that they might not even like is certainly disappointing, and I can’t deny I also share some of this feeling. But I’m still willing to give it a shot, as they might still surprise us in the end. The upcoming series was Akira Toriyama’s final work before his passing, and I respect Sparking! Zero choice of homaging him by adding his Daima Goku design to the game.
Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero releases on October 11.