Yajirobe is a samurai who loves running away from fights and is generally useless except for when he’s giving Goku health-restoring Senzu beans or slicing off Vegeta’s tail. Now the “bean daddy” (not that guy) is destroying players in Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero and being accused of breaking the meta in ranked matches.
The DBZ character has quickly become a top-tier Sparking Zero fighter even though he’s technically registered at just two destruction points, the game’s system for limiting just how stacked players can make their rosters. That puts Yajirobe in the same lane as Saibaman, Frieza Soldiers, and Guldo. However, the “bean daddy” is punching way above his weight.
“Bean daddy,” which I’m going to write as many times as my editor will allow, refers to Yajirobe’s penchant for always saving the day with Korin’s magical Senzu beans. In Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero, the series’ number one medic can heal himself repeatedly in matches using a renewable Senzu bean skill for three skill stocks. Combined with his ultimate, it can make him surprisingly effective despite being a back-bencher.
But the “bean daddy” is even more deadly due to the match timer. Whoever has the most health at the end of the time limit automatically wins. This means that Yajirobe players can simply land some hits and then keep running away and chowing down in order to eke out wins. It’s a cheap strategy that is also completely in keeping with the spirit of the character. And plenty of people are pissed about it.
The Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero subreddit, Discord, YouTube, and Tiktok are full of players confessing to getting wrecked in online matches by aspiring “bean daddies.” “Those that play bean daddy and spam senzus have super size dragon balls if you think I’m not gonna find you after that match…” lamented one player on the game’s unofficial Discord. “My only loss was to a Yajirobe dude who had like 5 low dp characters,” wrote another. “He spammed senzu bean and RAN AWAY until time ran out.”
And the “bean daddy” takeover may just be beginning. “Yajirobe is totally cracked,” according to one YouTuber. A second reads, “RANKED YAJIROBE WAS A MISTAKE!” People are already getting jaded. “Yajirobe needs a nerf, no I’m not kidding,” reads a Reddit thread. “’Just don’t let him use it.’ All it takes is like 2 seconds for him to activate it. He just has to wait it out and knock you away once and boom he’s back to full health again.”
But calls for “Bean Daddy” nerfs are already getting some pushback. Unlike a lot of fighting games, the Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi series upon which Sparking Zero is based was never aimed at pursuing perfect competitive fairness. They were supposed to be a celebration of the anime and the manga that it’s based on, inclusive of all its goofy absurdities and nonsensical plot developments. Some characters have more health and more powerful attacks in Sparking Zero, and to compensate, they take up more points on online rosters.
The new game focuses on online play and ranked leaderboards (sadly, local matches are limited to a single map), so there will be more pressure to balance characters than in the past. Even so, some want to preserve the series’ unhinged ethos. “Unpopular opinion, I want no character nerfed in Sparking Zero,” tweeted Twitch streamer rhymstyle. “Let the chaos be as it is designed to be. this is the Tenkaichi law since 2007.”
Order Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO: Amazon | Best Buy | Humble Bundle
.
