Get ready to initiate maximum Goku in October

DRAGON BALL: Sparking! ZERO - Release Date Announcement - YouTube

There's no shortage of Dragon Ball games in the world, but this one's a big deal to a certain crowd. Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero, which just got a release date trailer during Summer Game Fest's 2024 livestream, is the successor to the beloved Dragon Ball: Budokai Tenkaichi series, which hasn't had a new game in, oh, 15 years or so.

Sparking! Zero got the most buzz I've seen for a Dragon Ball game since 2018's FighterZ when it was announced in December 2023, and we won't have too much longer to wait for it; it's out on October 11.

The trailer above is unsurprisingly a montage of major Dragon Ball face-offs with villains like Frieza and Cell, but it also shows that the game will feature much more recent battles from Dragon Ball Super, like Ultra Instinct Goku (the most Goku of all Gokus to date) vs. ultimate strongman Jiren. If you don't recognize any of those names, well, you've got a few months to catch up on a few hundred episodes of anime. Better get started.

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).