Though Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero has been out for less than two months, it's already built its legacy. Currently, the flashy fighting game is the best-selling Dragon Ball game ever released in the U.S.
Sparking Zero is also "ranked third among all Bandai Namco Entertainment published titles in history," video game industry analyst Mat Piscatella writes in a Bluesky thread, as noticed by The Gamer. Elden Ring and Dark Souls III are the only Bandai games to have surpassed Sparking Zero's sales.
Even looking at more general metrics, like this year's video game sales overall, it's obvious that Sparking Zero landed like a meteor on the games industry. More of Piscatella's data shows that Sparking Zero quickly entered the highest ranks of 2024's list of the 20 best-selling games in the U.S., overtaking other popular (relatively) new releases like Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth and Tekken 8 by a mile.
- Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero is one of the best-selling games in Bandai Namco history: "A nice surprise in a year that's been kind of rough overall," says analyst
- Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero is the fastest-selling Dragon Ball console game in the series' 38-year history, with 5 million copies sold in 4 months
So, what's so great about Sparking Zero? It's tense, it's as vibrant as a wildfire, but some of the game's most popular positive Steam reviews don't seem sure.
"There is something very bad about the game community," says one highly upvoted, lightly tragic "Recommended" review. "There are people who leave the game when the match is about to end so that their rating does not decrease. Is this fair? I have faced a lot."
"As a long time Dragon Ball fan, the game is a really good time for a while," another positive reviewer says. "However, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention this game has A LOT of issues in the form of bugs, cut content, net-code, and rage quitters (this being a constant)."
In our own Sparking Zero review, we noticed that Sparking Zero is a fairly playable, and definitely beautiful, juicy piece of fanservice. It may not be life-changing, but comfort is a valuable commodity, too.
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