During Summer Game Fest this past week, it was announced that Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero will be released on October 11, 2024.
Following the debut of a new trailer highlighting some action-packed gameplay, Bandai Namco hosted its own showcase today to dive deeper into the game modes featured in the game. Today's showcase also revealed two brand-new game modes that will introduced with Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero: Episode Battle and Custom Battle.
Episode Battle is a single player mode where players can choose between eight characters — including Goku and Vegeta — and relive some of the key battles from the Dragon Ball Z anime, up until Dragon Ball Super's Tournament of Power. The number of stages and battles varies by character. Goku, for example, has the largest number of stages, beginning from when he fights Raditz up to and including his fights in the Tournament of Power Saga.
"Our goal for this mode is to allow players the satisfying challenge faced by characters and their friends," explained producer Jun Furutani.
It was also revealed that certain cutscenes allow players to experience part of the story from a first-person perspective. On certain stages, players' actions and choices can actually change the outcome of the story, resulting in alternative scenarios that play out differently from the anime series.
The second new mode is Custom Battle. In this mode, players fight in battles that each have their own original scenes. Within this mode is "Bonus Battles," a mode featuring matches that have been imagined by the developers. Some battles will have different victory conditions, while others may even have cutscenes that pop up mid-way.
In addition to battles created by the developers, and edit mode allows players to create their own original battle scenario.
The showcase also addressed one major fan question: local multiplayer, and some of the challenges the developers faced with implementing this.
"Our focus for this game was seeing how far we could get players to really become Dragon Ball series characters," Furutani explained. "We wanted to show effects like the wind blasting around and the weather changing just by charging your Ki, and rocks and buildings being dynamically destroyed by the force of battle, and take advantage of the power of the latest generation of consoles."
"With that in mind, it was difficult to implement local split-screen multiplayer while retaining those core elements," he admitted.
So Bandai Namco and developer Spike Chunsoft created Dragon Ball Sparking! Zero with online multiplayer and an offline single player mode in mind. Recognizing fan desire to player multiplayer locally though, they were able to implement a split-screen multiplayer mode exclusively within the "Hyperbolic Time Chamber" stage.
There is one small drawback though. Two players can not simultaneously select characters, so only one player may choose a character at a time. A small price to pay in order to incorporate a mode that many fans have been clamoring for.
Check out the full Dragon Ball: Spaking! Zero game mode showcase below and get ready for the game's launch on October 11, 2024. Pre-orders are now available across all platforms: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.