Anime arena fighters have been in an awkward slump for years thanks in significant part to the monumental gap left by Dragon Ball Z – the series’ last title, Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaichi 3, dropped back in 2007. In its absence, up-and-coming anime series like Demon Slayer, Jujutsu Kaisen, and My Hero Academia have tried to repeat their success but lacked the juice to be the next big anime fighter franchise. Yet with the series' grand return through Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero, there’s a real fear that the fan-favorite franchise will be a victim of its own success by failing to live up to the hype.
Having spent roughly two hours playing the game, I can say Sparking Zero doesn’t hang off the coattails of its past successes. Not only does it go beyond delivering the explosively fast paced action from the series past; it elevates it to greater heights by letting fans' imaginations run wilder than any Dragon Ball game has allowed them to ever since.
Going overboard
Right off the jump, Sparking Zero has one of the most extensive DBZ character rosters ever, with 180 characters available at launch. These characters – including movie and Dragon Ball GT standouts like Baby Vegeta and Pan – will be unlockable in-game by completing missions and battles or through its in-game currency, Zeni. When asked whether there were plans to add more characters to the game in the near future in a similar fashion to Dragon Ball FighterZ, producer Jun Furutani tells GamesRadar+ that Bandai Namco plans on releasing three waves of characters from Dragon Ball Super, Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero, and Dragon Ball Daima post-launch.
Asking a Dragon Ball Z fan to live out their dream scenario is like asking a fish to swim, so the first thing I do during my two-hour play session is dip my toe into the game's Custom Battle area, where I want to make Mystic Gohan and Perfect Cell duke it out in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber. However, I wisely cut my time short upon realizing how intimidatingly deep the system is for Dragon Ball sickos like myself. Custom Battle is basically Mario Maker on steroids for Dragon Ball Z fans. In it, you not only get to play as an anime director by picking out customizable episode title cards, cutscenes and dialogue from the game’s 500 adjustable nouns, you also get to choose the accompanying music, narrator, camera filters, and post fight cutscenes. What’s more, you can share these battles with folks online to try out your dream scenario Dragon Ball episode.
The game’s scripted version of Custom Battle, Bonus Battles – much like Dragon Ball Z: Super Sonic Warriors’ story mode – are a mix of what-if and expanded canon scenarios. These scenarios range from original battles like Perfect Cell teaming up with Goku against Babidi’s cronies, Kefla and Caulifla battling the entire roster of Super Saiyan fusions, or Future Trunks training with Piccolo. While any other game’s version of this system would be a breezy affair, Sparking Zero’s difficulty ceiling is surprisingly high, making these battles feel more like dungeon runs than light work.
Sparking Zero’s battle system is deceptively simple to understand yet challenging to master off the jump, and a significant contributor to that difficulty curve is how strong the game’s computer is when on an average setting. Unlike other games where you can figure out an exploit like spamming beam attacks to get cheap damage off of a CPU character to turn the tide of battle, Sparking Zero’s CPU will deflect beam attacks and chain teleport behind you faster than unversed hands can muster.
CPU characters will also call the series' old bluff of charging up Ki from a safe distance to enter battle in your newly minted sparking mode to – for all intents and purposes – perform a “wake up super” and turn around an unwinnable battle by copying the tactic in kind. In short, the AI knows your tactics and will match you blow for blow, making matches an enthralling war of attrition. I’ve no shame in admitting that I lost a majority of matches in the first 45 minutes playing various Bonus Battles – even the one I thought would be a gimme where Yamcha asked Vegeta to borrow his Saibamen to redeem himself from anime meme infamy. Thankfully, Sparking Zero is merciful to players both wayward and green, by rewarding you for putting in the effort through its newly minted proficiency system.
According to Furutani, two of the objectives the developers had while making Sparking Zero, aside from bringing the game to modern consoles, was to deliver a fast paced game with satisfying combat. To that end, Furutani also revealed that, unlike most arena fighters – which take a page out of traditional fighting games’ penchant for making characters balanced – Sparking Zero instead opts to make characters’ respective power levels as accurate to the anime as possible. On the light end of this metric, the cyan palette swap of Gokus and Vegetas making up much of Sparking Zero’s elusively large grid of mythos-spanning characters not only play in a distinct way from one another, they also have attacks that scale as their respective characters reach the end of Super. Whether that means SSJ4 Goku and Vegeta – the cooler design of any Super Saiyan form – can hold their own in a fight against Super Saiyan Blue counterparts begs to be explored.
On the opposite end of the non-power scaling spectrum is the reality that characters like Hercule won’t be able to do much damage against anyone, let alone fellow human characters like Krillin. While any other game would designate characters of Hercule’s ilk as “joke characters” to be left on the bench of the dream scenario matchups that Sparking Zero is in heavy surplus of, they actually lend themselves to the fun of the game’s replayability through the form of a character proficiency ranking system as well as the game’s shareable tournament modes.
Each character’s proficiency ranking system increases with every match you play – regardless of whether your match culminates in victory or defeat. This not only opens Sparking Zero up to the camp of achievement hunters and completionists, it also beckons players to test out wacky characters outside of their wheelhouse. This, in turn, loops back into the game’s sharable tournament maker, where you can challenge players both on your couch and around the world to overcome insurmountable odds by having Hercule not only complete a round robin tournament of top marquee characters, but defeating Broly single-handedly using either his dynamite kick or explosive present attack.
Fighting chance
"Sparking Zero’s depths are as deep as its Gokus and Vegetas are numerous"
Undoubtedly, the death nail for any anime arena fighter is its lack of combat depth and replayability. Fortunately, Sparking Zero is teeming with both in its custom and Episode Battles. Each Bonus Battles has objectives like winning a gauntlet match against a string of characters on an unreplenished health bar in a set amount of time. Successfully completing objectives rewards players with secret cutscenes and alternate battle paths in a similar fashion to Dragon Ball Z Budokai 2’s own Mario Party-esque game board.
Episode Battles, which see you play through a character’s story, pushes replayability even further by having players decide alternate routes in Dragon Ball Z canon through dialogue options and pure skill. For example, in Goku’s episode battles, you can turn Piccolo down and go it alone by fighting Raditz. Doing so will result in Goku fighting alongside Krillin, but upon failing to defeat Raditz in a set amount of time, the following cutscene will loosely follow how things go down in the anime – minus the difficult-as-hell full Nelson mini-game of its predecessors. However, if you happen to defeat Raditz before your time is up, you can unlock an entirely new story branch where Goku not only lives, but he trains Gohan himself in preparation for Vegeta and Nappa’s invasion. Doing so requires you to have the skills to pull off such a canon-breaking feat, and Sparking Zero will make you work for it because its combat, while familiar to folks who played past iterations, is surprisingly difficult.
However, Sparking Zero also keeps the series' worst enemy: its camera. To Sparking Zero’s credit, its camera tries its damndest to snap into place to make sure you can make sense of the action players are actively participating in by jutting toward the direction of characters, be they blitzing through destructible buildings or careening past oncoming beam attacks. Unfortunately, that same speediness leads to frustrating moments where a character’s dash attack will occasionally zip directly past a stationary enemy from point blank range – regardless of how hard you try to course correct their path toward a collision course.
This becomes especially common when either a player or an enemy is surrounded by rubble from destructible debris or are on the opposite end of a mountain. While running into this issue a lot while refamiliarizing myself with Budokai-isms, I fancied the idea of Sparking Zero featuring a soft lock on with its thumb stick to make dash attacks more advantageous, but the unruliness of enemy discoverability – unfortunately – is cleverly baked into the game’s design. For instance, defeating a Frieza Force member in a Nappa-centric Bonus Battle triggers an event where you must locate the next enemy in the open environment from the sound of their taunts before they bulldoze into you with a sneak attack. While this neat gimmick oozes Dragon Ball's signature style, the rule of cool can only go so far if it results in whiffing more attacks than you land.
Camera gripes notwithstanding, Sparking Zero is poised to not only be a Dragon Ball game for the ages, but a paradigm shift in how far the subgenre of games can go beyond run of the mill arena fighters that lose steam in a single session. Sparking Zero’s depths are as deep as its Gokus and Vegetas are numerous, and the only thing that can make the title soar to even greater heights is if it extends its gargantuan roster to include creator Akira Toriyama’s other characters, like Arale from Dr. Slump and Beelzebub from Sand Land. Overall, Sparking Zero feels like it will raise anime arena fighters to blisteringly new heights, all while emphatically asserting itself to the top of the totem pole as the definitive Dragon Ball video game.
We've not got long to wait until Sparking Zero's launch on October 11 - pass the time with the best fighting games you can play right now.
