Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero has several different rulesets and restrictions for multiplayer battles. DP Battles, for example, limit players to 15 "Destruction Points" when building their team. With different characters costing different amounts of DP to add to your team, this is likely intended to mitigate dominant strategies and encourage players to utilize weaker characters in exchange for a larger team and more versatility.
Whether DP Battles actually succeed at the goal of encouraging creative team building in Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero is up for debate, but this guide will focus on the mechanic itself. Read on to hear about the basics of the DP System and the methods you can use to mitigate the point limit and field more powerful characters.
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How DP Battles Work in Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero
Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero has an immense roster of playable characters, but not all of them are equal in strength. Certain characters are simply much stronger than others, so naturally the game developers took steps to prevent a single overpowered team from dominating ranked matches. The DP Battle system is intended to do exactly that, by assigning a "Destruction Point" cost to every character in the game based on their power and giving players a point limit. This limit is 15 Points, with some of the weakest characters costing 1 point, and some of the strongest costing 10 points.
This forces players to think carefully when selecting their team, since characters like Ultra Instinct Goku take up a ton of points to compensate for their tremendous strength. Using the teams shown in the images below to demonstrate, here's how your DP Limits can affect your team building.
In the first image, Team 1 consists of Goku (Ultra Instinct -Sign-) and Vegeta (Super Saiyan God), with the remaining three slots empty. This is because these two characters cost a total of 15 DP, using up the team's entire DP Limit. Team 2 (shown in the second image), however, consists of Spopovich, Goku (Teen), a Saibaman, Babidi, and Goku (GT). Since, excluding Goku (GT), all of these characters cost 3 or less DP, this team can fill every character slot.
How to Work Around the DP Limit in Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero
There are a few ways you can field stronger characters than your DP Limit allows, though this is only possible for characters with access to transformations and/or fusions. The more powerful forms of a character have higher DP Costs than their base form, but nothing is stopping you from deploying their base form and then spending Skill Count during a match to transform and access their more powerful states.
Similarly, some transformed characters cost more than their components, making it more cost-effective to deploy both characters individually. This also has the added benefit of allowing you to swap the fusion duo out and use a third character while they enjoy passive healing on the bench, then fuse them to combine their current health and deploy a much stronger character later in the fight.
Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero
- Released
- October 11, 2024
- ESRB
- T For Teen Due To Mild Language, Mild Suggestive Themes, Violence
- Developer(s)
- Spike Chunsoft
- Publisher(s)
- Namco Bandai
- Engine
- proprietary engine
- Multiplayer
- Online Multiplayer, Local Multiplayer
- Franchise
- Dragon Ball
- Platform(s)
- PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S
- Genre(s)
- Fighting, Action
- How Long To Beat
- 11 hours
- How Long To Beat (Completionist Runs)
- 80 Hours
- OpenCritic Rating
- Strong