Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero review: Resurrected by Shenron

A lot of our relationship with art — any art, whether it’s film, books, music, television, or yes, video games — is defined by when we discover it. Sometimes, things come into our lives at the right moment and stay forever. Dragon Ball came into my life when I was seven years old. It’s hard to think of more of a “right moment” than that. I was obsessed. I did my homework around when Dragon Ball Z would air on Toonami. I stayed up late on weekends to watch Dragon Ball Z: Uncut on Adult Swim. I watched all the straight-to-video movies (shoutouts to Bojack Unbound, which is low-key the best one). 

And I played the hell out of the video games. Whether it was the Legacy of Goku games on the Game Boy Advance, or the Budokai and Budokai Tenkaichi games on the PS2, Dragon Ball was a massive part of my life. Once, when I got sick with the flu for two weeks, my dad, who was a submariner and often at sea when I was a kid, bought me a copy of one of the Budokai games to help me get through it. Fighting games have always been one of my great loves; I grew up in arcades. Dragon Ball and a fighting game seemed like a match made in heaven.

Back From the Dead

So when I tell you I’ve been waiting for a game like Dragon Ball Sparking! Zero for a long time, well… the last game in this series, known as Budokai Tenkaichi in the west until this point, came out in 2007. I was 17 years old and still in high school. I’m 34 now, have a Master’s Degree, am happily married, and live in a completely different state. Budokai Tenkaichi 3 was half my life ago. But Sparking! Zero feels like coming home after a long time away, only this time the house isn’t the way you remember it. It’s better.

Sparking! Zero is a Sparking game, and that means there’s a lot to it. There are 182 characters in Sparking Zero, and the roster spans all of Dragon Ball’s history, from the original Dragon Ball to Dragon Ball Super and everything in between. That means characters from every era of Dragon Ball, including GT, the films, both canon and not, and the upcoming DAIMA. Yes, some of them are various transformations. If you look at the character select screen, you’re going to see a lot of Gokus. But these aren’t all the same character. Every single one has different combinations of Skill and Blast attacks, as well as unique combos. So you’ll have to learn every single one of your characters on your team to get the most out of them.

In addition, each also has access to the various transformations you’ll see throughout Dragon Ball’s history, though not all at once. The Goku from the beginning of Z can’t transform into Super Saiyan 3, for instance, and you won’t see Vegeta with a tail doing the Fusion dance. But if you pick a character in the right era, and it would make sense for them to have a fusion or a transformation, they will. So, who you play in Sparking! Zero is really up to you. You can run solo if you really want to, or you can choose up to five people. And yeah, you could start with Super Saiyan 2 Kefla if you wanted, but it’s kinda more fun to start with Caulifla and Kale and fuse them yourself. 

I Need a Hero

One of the fun things about Sparking! Zero is that it’s not really concerned about things like “balance” and “fairness.” What it is concerned with is making the characters feel as powerful (or as weak) as they are in Dragon Ball. That means both versions of Broly (either Z or Super) are absolute monsters who wouldn’t have too much trouble wiping the floor with, say, Krillin. It also means guys like Frieza, Perfect Cell, and Beerus are very, very strong, and Yamcha is… well, likely to end up face-down in a crater in that pose if he decides to throw down with them. This can make for some fun matches, especially if you pull out a win against a character that’s much more powerful than the one you’re playing with.

And you can, if you’re good enough. And that’s, I think, where Sparking! Zero surprised me most. Arena fighters, which are more or less what the Budokai Tenkaichi games have always been, are not generally known for their depth. But there’s a lot of it in Sparking! Zero, to the point that it can feel a little overwhelming at first. To play a character effectively, you’ll need to learn all their combos, Skills, Blasts, and Transformations, and then the combos, Skills, and Blasts for all those Transformed versions of the character, too. It’s a lot.

What gives Sparking! Zero its depth, though, are the system mechanics. There’s the obvious stuff, like managing your ki, which determines when you can vanish, use Skills and Blasts, and so on, but it’s more complicated than that. It’s about knowing when (and how) to do things like use Perception to automatically dodge and punish any attacks (while leaving yourself open to throws), or when to activate Sparking! Mode, or what a Step-In Sway is, or how to do a Z-Counter, and so on. There’s a lot to keep track of here, and some of it is fairly hard to do in the moment, but once you’re using High-Speed Evasion to get behind your opponent, winning beam battles, and nailing long combos, it feels awesome. Your reactions will have to be on point, and you’ll have to know what tools you can use when, but once you use Super Counter or a Sparking! Combo to end a close match, you’ll be hooked.

Every Frame a Panel

It’s a lot to take in, and practice, and implement in real-matches, but the best fighting games always make sure you have things to learn if you want to improve. Nobody would accuse Sparking! Zero of having as much depth as Namco Bandai’s own Tekken 8, but there’s plenty to keep you busy in training mode if you really want to tinker under Sparking! Zero’s hood to maximize your performance.

Which brings me to just how much stuff there is to do in Sparking! Zero. Silly as it sounds, it starts with the menus. Sparking! Zero nails Dragon Ball’s look and feel during matches, and like Dragon Ball FighterZ before it, you’d swear certain animations were ripped straight from the show or the manga. They look that good, and the attention to detail is there in matches, too, if two characters that have history are throwing down. And not just in a cool voice line way, but in a “this throw animation only happens if these two characters are fighting each other kind of way.” That rocks.

That same level of dedication carries over to Sparking! Zero’s menus. Navigating between menus means watching Goku fly or teleport to a new place full of other characters. Heading to Episode Mode or checking out the Custom Battles? You’ll be vibing with everyone at Bulma’s house. Getting ready to play the Tournament mode or just wanna fight? You’ll be chilling outside the World Martial Arts tournament. Wanna spend some time at the Gallery? Take a trip to Mr. Satan’s house to see him, Videl, and Majin Buu. Buying things at the shop? Pay Master Roshi and crew a visit at the Kame House. All the while, you’ll hear characters talking to each other or see them interact in the background. 

Who Run the World? Girls

Every part of Sparking! Zero takes place in the Dragon Ball world. If you go into the Gallery, you can even listen in on a group call where Bulma, Chi-Chi, and Videl talk about the different versions of each character. All of this may seem really minor, but it adds a lot to Sparking! Zero’s charm. The attention to detail here is stellar, and it really adds a lot to the general vibe. I liked the Girl Talk segments in the Encyclopedia section of the Gallery so much that I spent a while just picking characters at random and listening to what the girls had to say. And then I called my wife over to show it to her. Things like this are rare in AAA games these days, and I really enjoyed them.

And then there are the modes. Holy hell (or should I say HFIL? The real ones know), Sparking! Zero has a lot of modes. Your first stop should probably be Super Training, so you can come to grips with everything you can do. While there’s a lot here, Sparking Zero’s tutorial is very good. It’ll walk you through everything with pretty detailed explanations, will give you demos of what things look like, and makes it easy to retry something if you mess up. Fighting games live and die on their teaching tools, and Sparking! Zero is no exception. Thankfully, the folks at Spike Chunsoft understand that, and they nailed it the first time.

Once you’ve got the basics down, you’ll probably be spending time in Episode Mode, which guides you through the Dragon Ball story from the perspective of several characters, including Goku (shocker), Vegeta, Gohan, Piccolo, and a couple other surprises. These are pretty long and involved, though the cutscenes between missions are generally stills or short animated scenes. That said, it works because of the way it’s presented. Thanks to Whis, the whole of the Dragon Ball timeline is stretched out before you, and you’re zooming in on little sequences. It’s neat.

I Want You to Hit Me as Hard as You Can

The other cool thing about Episode Mode is the branching paths. Doing certain battles in certain ways — like say, defeating Android 18 really quickly as Vegeta or beating Frieza as Goku without the Spirit Bomb — open up cool, “What if?” scenarios. These are generally pretty hard to get because a lot of them boil down to “beat this character you’re just supposed to survive against fast”; you’ll probably have to come back after upgrading characters with the Capsules you can buy with the Zenni you’ll earn from playing the game, but it gives you a reason to play the story multiple times and some of these branches are pretty involved and quite long. I miss things like this in fighting game stories, and I’m glad Sparking! Zero is bringing this back.

Episode Mode is pretty grand, but it does have some downsides. If you clear a battle but want to try it again, you’ll have to skip through the following cutscenes, get to the next fight, and then quit and select the battle you want to replay. It’s a minor annoyance, but it can add up if you just want to unlock an alternate path. The sometimes drastic differences in power levels between you and the characters you’ll fight also mean there are some pretty intense difficulty spikes. Sparking! Zero is kind enough to ask you if you’d like to reduce the difficulty after you get dropkicked in the Dragon Balls a couple times, and you can get around most of them by equipping better Capsules or just getting better at the game, but it can be rough as you’re learning early on.

Fortunately, there’s plenty of other stuff to do. You can play several tournaments, drawing from in-universe rulesets like the Tournament of Power (you can’t fly, and lose if you go out of bounds) or customizing your own rulesets. There’s local versus against the CPU or another player, but weirdly local versus matches with another person are limited to the Hyperbolic Time Chamber stage, and nowhere else, which is a bummer.

Kill Your Friends, Guilt-Free

By far the coolest additions, though, are Bonus and Custom Battles, fun little scenarios you can play and then use to build your own scenarios, complete with unique win conditions, character dialogue, and more. There are several Bonus Battles for you to play if you’re not feeling super creative, but if you are, there’s a ton here. And like Super Mario Maker, but for Dragon Ball, any Custom Battle you design and complete can be uploaded to the internet so other people can play it. And there’s an in-depth tutorial there to lead you every step of the way early on. So if you’re a masochist out here to ruin other people's day, Dragon Ball style, great (provided you can beat the sicko nonsense you’ve dreamed up yourself). If you just wanna have fun, you can do that, too. But either way, I love that Sparking! Zero lets you be creative.

Doing all of this stuff completes challenges for Zen-Oh and Whis, which reward things like Zenni, titles, and even Dragon Balls, which can be used to wish for even more Zenni, titles, characters, and so on. No matter how you play Sparking! Zero, you’re always making progress towards the next thing. And that’s awesome.

[Insert Goku Power-Up Scream Here]

Of course, there is online play, but I wasn’t able to test it before the game’s early access release. Hopefully, it’s good. If not, well… There's plenty here to keep you occupied if you’re just playing solo. And if you’re worried about online play being the same three overpowered characters over and over again, don’t be. Team compositions are limited by a point system; the better a character is, the more points they cost. You can absolutely use those crazy powerful characters; you just won’t be able to use a lot of them at once.

I ended my time with Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero much the same way I started it: really excited to play more of it. I’ve already dumped a lot of time into Sparking! Zero, but there’s still a lot more to see. I have more alternate paths to complete, more costumes to unlock, plenty of other mechanics to master, more Capsules to play with, new teams to build… I could be here for a while, now that I think about it. The greatest compliment I can pay to a game is to say that I want to keep playing it after I’m done covering it. I want to keep playing Sparking! Zero. It’s been a long, long time coming, but Sparking! Zero is worth the wait. That little kid who grew up loving Dragon Ball would love that. I’m really happy for him. 

This review is based on an early digital PC copy supplied by the publisher. Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero comes out on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC on October 10th, 2024.

Will Borger

Contributing Editor

Will Borger is a Pushcart Prize-nominated fiction writer and essayist who has been covering games since 2013. His fiction and essays have appeared in YourTango, Veteran Life, Marathon Literary Review, Purple Wall Stories, and Abergavenny Small Press. His games writing has also appeared at IGN, TechRadar, Into the Spine, Lifebar, PCGamesN, The Loadout, and elsewhere. He lives in New York with his wife and dreams of owning a dog. You can find him on X @bywillborger.