If you go on traditional fighting game twitter, you might see posts like this. These sparking zero numbers are amazing, but respectfully it's an arena fighter. It maybe is a fighting game, but it's not a fighting game. Or from RufoMonger, arena fighters are not fighting games.
Which might seem weird at first glance, like of course it's a fighting game, dudes are literally beating the shit out of each other. If you consult the CoreA Gaming Fighting Chart, it makes the list but as a non-traditional fighter. And at competitions like EVO, the World Championship of Fighting Games, the vast majority of games come from the traditional side of the chart. That's not to say traditional fighters can't be played competitively.
Super Smash Bros. has a thriving competitive scene, and the series actually made it to EVO several times. Really, I think the question we are trying to answer here is, is Sparking Zero worthy of being a main game at EVO? And if you asked me a month ago, I would have said, hell no. But playing Sparking Zero for the past week has opened my eyes to similarities arena fighters share with traditional fighting games. I'm still undecided, so before we can answer the question of can Sparking Zero be played competitively, let's explore these differences and similarities between traditional fighting games and Sparking Zero.
One of the best things about fighting games to me is that it's a game that rewards time and effort. And just like in fighting games, Sparking Zero really rewards tech skill. If you look at the game footage from back when I was like just starting out, I was mashing, I didn't know what I was doing, I was losing to everyone, and after a couple days after getting a lot of tech skill down, after figuring out a lot of strategy i'm no longer losing to random people and it's because this game has a significant amount of skill involved that you have to exploit to get good games like rock paper scissors for example i have i have a chance that someone has not played rock paper scissors very much in my life to beat someone that's at the pinnacle of rock paper scissors right because there's not a very high skill ceiling but in this game I've played some of the best players and they've rocked my shit because they've been playing arena fighters for many more years than I have, right?
And to me, I think it's undeniable that arena fighters do have a high skill ceiling. So this game has a bunch of tech to it. So this is an example of a faint dash.
There's a lot of different on block pressure you can do. Yeah, just to go to the back, this beats stuff like perception. There's also some really cool movement tech.
So you can basically teleport behind them. And catching their back is really important in this game because your defense is a lot worse on the back. And you can't just instantly swap around if you're holding guard or perception.
This is another example, very similar, but you can go under a ki blast and then you can combo the ki blast into attack. There's a lot of advanced tech to this game, just like a traditional fighting game. And so just like traditional fighting games, there's also option selects in Sparking Zero. So one of the option selects I've been doing, is I've been doing up plus square which is your super counter it's really really strong and because it only has like a two frame window to do it you can afterwards you can press r1 which gives you vanish so it's a really good defensive option select to give you one of two different options depending on what the timing is so let me just show this off in the actual match he's gonna come attack me he's gonna come attack me right and so I'm mashing this option select and there I got the um I got the super counter, which is really strong. But in case I missed the super counter, which I got there again.
And so instead of... So there, there's a good example. I still did the OS.
I missed the super counter, but instead I got vanish. So there's actual advanced tech in this game that it's going to take a while for people to implement. So this is another example.
To me, the execution is actually more demanding than a game like Street Fighter 6. So something like this, while it looks really easy, It's actually a really tight link because you have to cancel your dash into another dash and then you have to do the right amount of attack hold in order to get this combo. If you mess up any of the timing, they're able to guard. And also, I think neutral has a lot of similarities to traditional fighting games.
So, for example, people might look at this game and be like, oh, it's very mash heavy. Like I just mash square. I just I just how I say I just keep doing shit.
I just I just skip neutral and I just vanish. You can make that argument for any game, right? Like Street Fighter 6, all you do is mash Honda headbutt at low level.
But take, for example, this move right here. It seems really good, but think of it as Street Fighter 6 Drive Rush. You can do this, but if your opponent's looking out for it, they can get a counter.
Take this example where I'm playing against the opponent. I am scouting out. I'm basically hyper-focusing, looking for the super dash.
I react to super dash with a sidestep, and I get a full punish on his back. Yeah, being able to dodge the whatever it's called. Drive rush is so nice. And the other thing is, there's an audience for this game.
So in order for a fighting game to be competitive, you have to have people that play it, right? If you don't, if there's no competition, it's going to be a pretty shitty time. And this game has all the competition you need.
We're at 110,000 people playing right now, which is insane considering games like Street Fighter VI, even at their peak, didn't even hit this. high right but there's a number of arguments against this game being a competitive fighting game and i think the very first one is pretty obvious there is no attempt at balancing at all and this isn't like me just like saying this game's not balanced even though the dragon ball uh sparking zero devs literally say this game is less about balance and more about feeling overpowered as you should playing gogeta and the ironic thing is you think that like blue gogeta would be like overpowered it actually couldn't be further from the truth right so the way the system works is if you go in the ranked and you go in the battle you go in the online and you go in the rank match and you hit this dp battle right it's basically like a ratio system and that people used to use for like some of the old games where you basically you get 15 points to uh use a character the best teams don't actually have gogeta in them they don't have blue vegeto in them right the teams that are running the meta Our character is like Yajirobe, who's only on two costs. And you could make the argument that Yajirobe is a better character than Gogeta, which makes no sense in terms of the lore.
It's almost as if they basically didn't choose to look at balancing whatsoever. And the reason Yajirobe is so cheap is he has this move called Sensu Bean, which basically gives him a full heal once he builds enough meter. And you build the meter by getting hit.
So you can just keep stalling the match over and over. And there's certain things like for example, a lot of people consider Super Saiyan or Super Vegito to be a better character than Super Saiyan God, Super Saiyan Vegito. Even in Solo Battle, right?
Even if the DP didn't even matter, Super Vegito is considered to be a better character because he has access to After Image Strike. After Image Strike is a really strong move because it basically makes you invincible to attacks for 15 seconds. Very, very strong.
This is the character I've been using compared to Super Saiyan God, Super Saiyan Vegeta that has a lot less useful special moves. All right. The second thing is that the meta is just, I don't want to call it whack, but it's very clearly that. This game was not designed with competitive intentions, right?
I was playing Voxelizing, they're like the guy that won literally the first tournament for this game as a $500 pot bonus. A really really strong player. This is what our match looked like. Combos are fake because they can super counter out of them.
And then any time that they super counter you can vanish, and then you can vanish their vanish, and it basically becomes a rhythm game at this point. You're basically playing a bunch of different mini games. If they are on point, you can actually super counter back to super counter, and then you can super counter back to super counter. These are all like two frame windows, right?
So it's like in Street Fighter 6, like your perfect pairing, except it's no risk and it's way stronger and you can keep doing it over and over. So it really comes down to who can time their stuff better. But it's really hard to practice because let's say you go and you are like, all right, well, I'm gonna head on ranked in order to play this game.
There's no rollback. which is really brutal because if you're trying if you're trying to practice stuff offline you go online it's all delayed based and you have all these like two frame timing windows you're gonna completely screw up all the timings right there's no cross play which is really important for tournaments so like everyone can like join the same tournament but my number one pet peeve and and why they clearly had no competition of mine is this training mode is the most garbage training mode i've ever played in in the last like 50 i've been playing fighting games for 12 years i think this legitimately might be the worst training mode roblox tekken has a 100 times better training mode than this all right so you got training settings right you have gauge six okay you can do infinite meter that's cool right uh display settings you literally have one display setting you could you can hide the ui okay that's that's two out of your three menus down and then the opponent's settings you think you'd be able to like get them to like do certain things Like these things all exist, but like they're all useless because they don't actually work as intended. So let's say perception. Like, all right, I just want the opponent to hold perception, right? Like that'd be pretty useful.
Like just hold perception. Perception is really strong. Look what it does. It just fucking dances around.
None of them work. There's no like after first hit use perception. There's no like after block use perception. There's no way to record the dummy doing something. There's no way.
You can't do jack shit with this fucking training mode. I don't understand the point of any of this shit. You literally, in order to train mode, you have to go online and you have to play with someone.
Or how I recorded the guide for this game, I literally, I held two controllers in my hand. And some of the comments were like, why aren't you using the training mode? This is exactly why. Apparently, some of the comments told me, and this is actually fucking hilarious if true, that if you go into the store, you can buy additional training mode settings.
Wait, let me see if I-I don't know if it's actually true. I might be-I might be capping, but I heard you can buy additional trading mode settings, which is the funniest thing. It's in customization.
Oh yeah, you can actually buy additional-you have to buy with money additional trading mode settings. So I guess I can, uh, set the-I mean, there- They're all probably useless, I'm gonna keep it real. But, uh, yeah, so if I wanna have them practice vanishing, I gotta purchase it. No, it's not real money, it's money you earn from playing the game. Alright, attack strategy vanishing, alright.
So he should vanish, right? So he should be vanishing. Bro, he's just jumping and throwing a fucking keyboard!
No, I'm done, bro! Alright, I guess he vanished there. But like no this this is useless dog.
This is actually useful. There are a couple other issues uh one is this game actually has a couple of like very crippling glitches. There's this glitch like you'll randomly go online and maybe like once every 50 like 20 games you won't be able to swap your team or if you play on classic controls you won't be able to use skills and because swapping and skills are so strong you basically lost the game because of a random glitch that happened because i don't know bandai namco just said it like you can't swap your teammates today all right so this is where you guys decide twitch chat can this game be played competitively i think i made arguments for both sides uh we'll do a pool should this game be at evo we'll say yes and yes if patched balance all right go go vote it's actually pretty divisive it's actually pretty divisive a lot of you guys are just saying no a lot of you guys are saying yes but basically i i think all of us are in agreement that in this game's current state this game's kind of a joke competitively i'm gonna keep it a buck honestly a lot of the games are going to time out in uh in dp mode which is why i'm just not playing because everyone just everyone just plays five low cost they they lame people out and uh combos are really hard to do and it really just comes down to the rhythm game right so i i think it's current state this this game probably should not be a devo this game probably should not be competitive but i think if you balanced it correctly like if you for example add actual training mode added rollback they're probably not gonna do that right but even just balancing the game to the point where like super counters aren't just like totally overpowered and more characters are viable and some of these g strategies are reduced you know low costs aren't like super overpowered and etc etc i really think this game could be played competitively have a pretty interesting future obviously you could play the game competitively no matter what people play competitive rock paper scissors even if this game's not balanced you can still play it competitively and i think the best players will still come out on top to me that's that's a no-brainer right that's a no-brainer this game could be played competitively but uh yeah will this game be evil worthy that's a lot harder question to answer let me know what you guys think down in the comments below as always like share subscribe and take care y'all peace