Fighting games have a long history of characters that can be considered too powerful. Some are so powerful that their power seems far past the intended character balance. Marvel vs Capcom 2 is one of the best examples where 10% of the characters are so above the rest of the roster that they can’t hold a candle in a professional setting.
Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero is an oddity in that regard due to the development team deliberately setting out to make characters that are leaps and bounds stronger than others, with this idea being that powerful characters should be powerful. Okay, I can understand that.
Except, it went wrong in a big way. In their attempts to make the game unbalanced in a fun way, they have made it unbalanced in a highly exploitative way, where some characters have possibly unintended advantages over the rest of the cast. I’ve been playing this game for at least 60 hours on ranked mode now, and the game is not working as intended because in their haste to make strong characters broken, they made some of the weakest characters insanely strong by accident. Let’s go into some of the funny situations that have arisen from their vision for a Dragon Ball game:
So, to go into how the game works, you have single battle, which is one versus one, and DP battle which is a team vs team situation. Yajirobe, at the time of writing, is the biggest menace to the PC DP ranked ladders. He’s a weak, very low-stat character who deals little to no damage and does not have a proper energy blast. His specials are very short-range but a little hard to dodge, so he’s usually in your face a lot.
But they gave him a move that instantly heals him back to a full three health bars in two seconds, which he can use as long as he has five skill points (skill points are gained through executing dodges, blocking, executing dodges, etc.) So what this means is this small, unassuming character can whittle down even the strongest of fighters, and should you get him close to death, if you get knocked back even once, Yajirobe can hit the reset button and you’re fighting him as if he was a new character all over again. And with a ticking timer going on in the background, Yajirobe can cause timeout victories like nobody’s business if the player is even half-competent at dodging. Stronger characters take around six seconds to heal/regenerate and only revive a small amount of health. I guess Yajirobe must have had a fan on the balance team.
Update: As of a recent patch, he was nerfed to two and a half health bars rather than three, and his heal move has been increased to six skill points rather than five. A really hefty nerf but honestly, I still find it funny that a potential winner of a hot dog eating contest was the first and only nerfed character.
Super Vegito has a 10 DP blue-haired variant that deserves the level of strength it exerts. What doesn’t make any sense is that the skill move “Afterimage strike” is limited to his less powerful form and provides far more of a rage-inducing gimmick.
“Afterimage strike” takes three of your hard-earned skill points and turns on “Auto-Dodge”, instantly teleporting Vegito behind your opponents for an easy free combo. Now, while the regular afterimage is used tactically, this version completely grabs you by the dragon balls and removes them. I estimate about twenty seconds of dodging every hit, super or explosion your opponent might try to hit you with, allowing you to immediately turn the battle to your favor, again and again.
While not immediately spammable, this move provides any Vegito user with an instant timeout where if you dare to try to damage him, you will be punished at any time after he has three skill points accrued. And with his naturally high hp pool, or fusion given five health bars. This guy can waste entire teams on his lonesome unless you lab extensively on how to survive during the period of time he can flash step into your house and take your last bagel from the bread bin mid-match.
Marketed as “The fastest in the universe”, Burter more than lives up to this premise. Not in terms of actual speed, but from a naturally extended combo string, where his hits and strings perform dramatically differently from any other character. This means that when you fight Burter, your timings, counter potential and reaction speed are tested to the maximum. Looking for gaps in this man’s offense is the same as looking for a person who enjoyed Concord unironically.
For such a low-cost character, Burter has a distinct advantage, and it isn’t always going to be easy for a newer player to even hope to counter him like they would any other character except perhaps Super Saiyan 4 Gogeta.
A list like this wouldn’t be the same without mentioning this dominating force in single battle mode. Extraordinarily fast normals, large health pool, and a skill that lets him enter Sparking mode instantly, (Sparking mode being access to longer combo strings, ultimate blasts and an extra ki bar.) this version of Gogeta has every tool needed stacked on top of each other to overwhelm everyone on the roster. This is more your naturally found overpowered character, similar to Vergil from Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3. While I feel someone has to fill the spot of top dog on every roster, his sheer dominance on the leaderboards made me feel he deserves to be on this list.
Sparking! Zero has this great gimmick of taking large bosses and making them playable as giant juggernauts of power. To achieve this effect, they gave all of them super armor, allowing them to tank weaker hits and continue with their attacks. On top of this, their slow, clumsy attacks are mixed in with a very fast, almost instant dash attack, and their grabs are uninterruptible by basic hits. What this amounts to is a large, spammable character who makes the camera go awkward and hard to see.
Let’s pair this with someone like Janamba, who can transform out of being giant, or someone like Dr. Wheelo, who attacks faster, and we’re left with a very difficult fight mainly due to the game’s own mechanics being arbitrary and subject to rigorous testing before you can understand what does and does not stop them. During my 80 hours of playtime, I have found that every character has “Will they, won’t they?” on breaking armor, and even on breaking parts of the stage.
Anilaza is left off this list because he has ridiculously high DP power, making them fair but also losing viability.
A lot of people have ignored the andoids, but not me. Android 19 is an android-type character, which means they don’t charge to get energy; they usually gain it passively at a faster pace, but less than a character’s charge.
What makes these two special is that their grabs absorb the energy of non-android characters. Meaning you can take your opponent’s setups and turn them into yours, instantly gaining an upper hand.
But what makes them specifically unbalanced is the skill “False courage”. This gives both of them temporary super armor allowing them to move up to a player and instantly grab them to steal their energy. They can do this repeatedly with little to no counter until their super armor runs out. At this point, the skill, costing one skill point, will have already been replenished, allowing them to do it again. Usually, to counter such skills you would use a beam to interrupt them, but in these cases, your energy has already been stolen.
This makes these characters infuriating to deal with because to counter their grab, you have to condition yourself to also attempt to grab and then win the little minigame to get them off you. The steps required to counter this strategy alone make this unbalanced.
While this is for the -sign- variant of Goku, what really makes this unbalanced is that they provide a mid-battle transformation into Mastered Ultra Instinct Goku. This character provides ridiculous super range, insane speeds and debatably the strongest ultimate blast in the game. For eight Dp points, you can get the equivalent of a ten-power character with all the additional tools that -sign- can provide. -Sign- Goku is a monster who can transform into an even worse monster. It makes sense why this is one of the most favored characters in ranked at the time of writing.
This is the current state of the game; 80% of teams include some form of what you see above. With the clash between the games’ intended power balance and unintentional balance issues, we’ve got to wonder if the game will lean more into its overpowered buffet style or calm down to become a game with a more varied character pool for the ranked setting. Only time will tell.
