There have been numerous games based on the Dragon Ball franchise over the years, including more recent games such as Dragon Ball FighterZ, Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot, and Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2. Even with these very well-received games, fans have been asking for a return of the Budokai Tenkaichi series. After 17 long years, the series has finally made its triumphant return with the release of Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero.
A Long Time Coming
The naming structure of the Dragon Ball games has often been a bit off, especially when the English and Japanese releases differed in name. For instance, Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Tenkaichi from 2011 was not part of the Budokai Tenkaichi series, but rather a follow-up to the Raging Blast series. Also, the Budokai Tenkaichi series in Japan was instead called Sparking, Sparking! Neo, and Sparking! Meteor of simply Budokai Tenkaichi 1, 2, and 3. Now with Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero, the Japanese name has been used for the worldwide release for the first time.
As mentioned with the different series within the Dragon Ball franchise above, there have been many different genres even within the fighting genre that the series has taken on. The Budokai Tenkaichi series is a large arena fighter where two fighters face off against one another complete with destructible environments, which Sparking! Zero continues with both it’s great features and also its flaws that always pop up.
Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero is truly a bigger and better version of what we’ve seen in the past with a similar gameplay style. Do you want to melee the opponent into oblivion with physical combos? You can do that. Would you rather focus on powering up your ki and doling out super moves and ultimate attacks? You can do that too. That’s one of the great things about this game and series in the past is that you can really go about playing in your own way, though there are some limitations.
In total, Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero has 182 playable characters at launch including the pre-order bonus of Goku (Mini) from the new Dragon Ball Daima series. This is a new record for the series and just shows how much time and effort the developers put in to one up the large roster of Dragon Ball Budokai Tenkaichi 3 even. This number does count the numerous transformations and forms, so that means 19 of them are Goku and 14 are Vegeta for example. However, this is still an incredible roster with characters spanning Dragon Ball Z, GT, Super, and even the non-canon movies. I was so glad to see some of my favorites like Tapion weren’t cut just because we had a lot of new Dragon Ball Super characters added. Original Dragon Ball really got the biggest shaft in the game character wise, but I have no doubt DLC will shore that up later with guaranteed adds like General Tao and Demon King Piccolo being shoo-ins in a dedicated Dragon Ball DLC pack.
Something else I really appreciated in Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero was the fact that you actually have to work to unlock everything. Too many fighting games now have everything unlocked from the get go, which really takes away something from those games. Not only do you have a large number of character to unlock, but also alternate costumes and more throughout the game. This adds a lot of replayability into the mix from the start, as it will take you quite awhile to unlock everything in this game.
Often one of the most key elements of any fighting game is for the roster to be balanced so that players do not have unfair advantages. That is not how Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero works though, but it is for a good reason. Having Super Saiyan 4 Gogeta and Mr. Satan be on an even playing ground in a fight makes no sense, so the game actually makes it more unbalanced to where you have to strategize with who you are using in teams or in solo combat. This does sadly make the lower tier characters harder to use in online competition most of the time, but people will always find the better characters and always use them anyways online. Instead, you may have to work harder with these lower level characters to win, but it makes the victories you get all the more satisfying too. I’m glad they at least include characters like Mr. Satan and even others like Yajirobe to really provide us with the largest and more versatile Dragon Ball roster ever. Hopefully the DLC will fill in some of the other gaps from the original Dragon Ball and GT as well.
Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero features stellar animation that feels based on the gorgeous Dragon Ball Super: Broly film from a few years ago, which looks just as good in action here. Seeing the massive character roster in action on the stages that look ripped straight from the anime is pretty amazing and moves fluidly in combat.
The combat system in Sparking! Zero offers players two options, Standard and Classic, though there are only a few changes between the schemes. For Classic, guarding, flying up or down, and ki charge are all done just as they were in the previous entries in the series, while Sparking! Zero’s new Standard control scheme moves them around a bit.
Combat in Sparking! Zero is just as you would expect too, which is great to see for longtime fans of the Budokai Tenkaichi series. Regardless of the control scheme, you can attack using Square on PS5 and then combo by mixing in Triangle as well. Pressing Triangle by itself will shoot ki blasts as well. There are also buttons to dodge, guard and charge ki. This is the same for every character, but where things vary are the techniques that each character has available.
Every character in Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero has five total techniques, two Skills, two Blasts, and one Ultimate Blast. These are all tied into your ki gauge. The ki gauge is made up of five mini bars that you can fill up by charging your ki and then expend a certain amount to unleash either of your Blast attacks. Next to this bar is your Sparking gauge that gradually fills up throughout the match with a number counter showing for each time it has filled up. Based on the Skills that you have available for that character and the number next to them, you can activate them as long as the Sparking gauge number is that number or higher.
Once the counter has reached at least one, you can then go into what is known as Sparking Mode. When it is at least one, charge your ki to maximum and it will then start filling up again, this time with a blue sparking design until it fills up entirely again and turns purple. This means your character has entered Sparking Mode, where you can hit your opponent with much longer combos and even be able to hit stronger enemies with launching combos that normally might be much more difficult to execute.
Most important to Sparking Mode is the ability to unleash your Ultimate Blast attack. By doing this, it will instantly take you out of Sparking Mode after, so make sure to use up the full meter as much as possible before going into the Ultimate Blast. These are some of my favorite parts to watch in the game, as you get to watch character’s signature move in action, dealing massive damage to the opponent and the arena itself. I will never grow tired of seeing each game’s take on Majin Vegeta’s Final Explosion, which is one of my favorite moments in the entire franchise. Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero also has 12 stages to choose from, with each of them having destructible environments ready to be taken out by your Ultimate Blast techniques just like you would see in the anime.
Beyond the base versions of the characters, you can also customize the characters with ability items. Each character can be equipped with up to seven ability items, which range greatly in what they can do. These include ones that raise your health or your Ultimate Blast Attack power, lower the count required for fusions or transformations, and many more that you can purchase in the shop. You can also select which outfit they will wear as well as add accessories to them. These costumes often show different degrees of battle damage, some of which can be altered in battle too. I also like that you can set music tracks for each character, though these are very limited unless you buy the Anime Music Packs that are available as DLC as of launch.
As soon as Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero released, all you could read online was about people complaining about the difficulty, but that’s something that has always been a part of this series. The enemies often are punishing and will beat you into submission, requiring you to adapt and change your strategies. The one battle most often mentioned is the fight against Great Ape Vegeta, but I personally only took two tries to beat him the first time and then was able to move on. There were other fights I had much greater difficulty with, but also just had to try to find a new method to beat that certain opponent and win. I can see the difficulty turning some people off from the game immediately, but I highly recommend sticking it out and you’ll eventually start to get the hang of things and know better ways to survive against these tough opponents.
Back when the original Budokai Tenkaichi games were out, the multiplayer focus was on local play, even though the third entry did have online play for Wii that didn’t work very well at all. Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero is in a very different era and obviously has the ability to players to go online and fight opponents from all over the world. This is great and works very well in my experience, but the major downside though is that offline multiplayer has been nerfed greatly. In fact, the only place you can do offline multiplayer in the game is on the Hyperbolic Time Chamber stage, while the remainder of them are not allowed. This is pretty disappointing, but not all that surprising in today’s gaming landscape. Perhaps we’ll see an update later add more maps to the offline multiplayer options, but for now it’s limited to just the one.
Dragon Ball games have had various method of telling the story of Dragon Ball over the years, with Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero taking a more character-based focus. In the game’s Episode Battle, you can play the story mode of Goku, Vegeta, Gohan, Piccolo, Future Trunks, Frieza, Goku Black, and one more unlockable story mode for another character I’ll let you discover for yourself. During that character’s story mode, you will only play as that one character except during very specific circumstances like being able to switch out or have someone come in to finish a fight for story reasons.
For anyone that played the most recent Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm game, Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero takes a similar approach with the game’s cutscenes. I was hoping for more fully animated cutscenes like we’ve seen in some Dragon Ball games over the years, especially with how amazing the game’s visuals look, but here it is a mix. Sometimes you will get some animated sequences and fights, but then it will very quickly transition into a series of screenshots. It might have been a little more tolerable if the screenshot sequences had voice acting as well, but those are left only for the fully animated sections.
While it would have been nice to have full animation for this entire game with the cutscenes, it is somewhat understandable considering how much story is being told here between the characters and the series as a whole. However, due to the sort of scattershot way of storytelling and story sequences, this definitely is not the type of game for a newcomer to Dragon Ball as a whole to play and have any idea what is actually happening due to how much is glossed over or skipped entirely. Even so, it features enough of the story beats and important moments that fans of the series will have no problems at all keeping up with the method of storytelling.
Not only do you get to play through the main story beats of the selected characters that you know from the series already, Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero also has a number of alternate what if scenarios. Some of these are just different endings where someone else defeats the main boss, such as Gohan defeating Dabura in the Majin Buu saga and Majin Buu never being resurrected, complete with a new ending sequence of screenshots or animation.
The much more involved what ifs though are known as Sparking Episodes, which are multi-stage scenarios for you to explore. Every Episode Battle character has at least one Sparking Episode available, with Goku, Vegeta, and Future Trunks having multiple. I will probably never grow tried of playing through the classic story of Dragon Ball Z, which was made even better by having the story of Dragon Ball Super here as well, but getting pretty involved what if stories too are a great addition to the game. The Sparking Episodes are varied in their stories too, such as Goku going Super Saiyan against Vegeta for the first time instead of Frieza or Gohan managing to beat Golden Frieza when he returns. The latter one sets a chain reaction that also introduces a new variant of a character we’ve never seen before in the franchise, but I’ll leave that one for you to find out yourself since it’s a really cool surprise that I did not see coming at all.
There is one aspect of Episode Battle that can be really frustrating though, which is the battles where the default condition is to just survive and not win. For instance, the next to last fight on Goku’s Episode Battle against Goku Black and Zamasu has two win conditions, the default of surviving and the alternate of winning quickly. My first time playing I did it quickly and unlocked the dead end video showing they won and then couldn’t move forward in the story. Instead, I had to go back and find a way to drag out the fight longer while still staying alive just to get the survive completion to advance the story to the next arc. The whole point is so you don’t defeat them in battle and have to fuse with Vegeta with the Potara earrings to become Vegito. It makes sense for the story, but completing it fast like this really should unlock both paths and allow you to just continue on the other path. Even if they were better about providing a timer of how long you have to take in the battle would be helpful, especially for the other alternate ones as well.
Beyond Episode Battle, you also have Custom Battle to play with even more variety at your fingertips. Custom Battle is similar to that of Super Mario Maker in that you can create your own custom battles with specifications and must be able to beat it yourself before being able to upload it for others to use online. There are two options to start with Simple Edit and Normal Edit, with the former being based on auto-selected effects and events.
To start, you have to select the lineup of characters that will be fighting, with up to five being available for each of the two teams. From there, you can select character settings like whether to allow transformations or having any switch limit rules or a time limit. You can even set free slots to allow the person who will be playing to pick the character that will be used in that slot. Then, you pick the stage from the list of all the ones available in the game. You also can set trigger conditions for how to win or having other things happen in the battle, such as unlocking the ability to use certain moves or forcing characters to switch out. There is so much you can setup here to where every battle can feel totally different from the next.
Setting up the battle is far from all that Custom Battles entail, as you get to create the entire scenario as if it was something in story mode. This means you get to create the cutscenes surrounding it, albeit without voice acting, from the pre-existing options in the game. This includes an opening title screen, the opening sequence, and even ending sequences for if you win or lose. The title screen even allows you to change the background, music, and text for the “episode” on it. The only downside here is that you are limited in the titles of the battles that you can use, though you can unlock more through collecting the Dragon Balls. I do wish you could just input whatever text you wanted, but I also understand why they probably didn’t include that option.
After setting up your Custom Battle and beating it yourself, you can upload it for others around the world to try out. Naturally, this means there are countless available for you to play that others have uploaded as well in the World Library. Not only are those available, but Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero also has a Bonus Battles library full of Custom Battles created just for this game by the developers. Not all of these are available from the start either, so you’ll have to work to unlock more of them by finishing other Bonus Battles. I absolutely loved how much customization was available here and having a feature like this adds so much more longevity to a game that is already destined to have a lot of DLC coming that will only bolster this mode even further.
Verdict
Like past entries in the series, it may take a little while for Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero to really click with you due to the perceived difficulty at the start. Once it does click though, you are in for a real treat with easily one of the best Dragon Ball games to date. With a massive character roster and high flying combat that perfectly emulates the series, Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero delivers a Kamehameha of gratification for fans of the series and is something that would have made series creator Akira Toriyama very proud.
Score: 9/10
Pros:
- Most extensive roster in Dragon Ball game series history
- Gameplay feels like more polished version of the previous entries
- Episode Battles span much of the series
- Unique Sparking Episodes
- Beautiful visuals
Cons:
- Frustrating vague win conditions in Episode Battles occasionally
- Use of non-voiced screenshots at times instead of fully animated cutscenes
- Local multiplayer limited to one stage
Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero review code was provided by the publisher. You can read MP1st’s review and scoring policy right here.
