Review: Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO
There have been many games based on Dragon Ball, the anime series that spun off from the late Akira Toriyama’s totemic manga. Several of these games have gone back to the same well over and over again – letting you play through various events from across the Dragon Ball canon, fighting all the big bads, turning Super Saiyan and accessing the myriad other characters and forms across the series. The general consensus has been that no Dragon Ball game has better represented the show than the Budokai Tenkaichi series on the PlayStation 2 – and for a long time, fans have wanted a successor.
Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO is Budokai Tenkaichi 4 in all but name. It’s a new 3D fighting game that lets you fly around wide open spaces, having fights that genuinely resemble the fights from the anime – it’s visually stunning. The basic controls are easy to learn – there’s a block, a standard attack, a ki blast, and then holding down the right trigger lets you “power up” and access your special attacks. If you power up enough, you can enter “sparking” mode and launch faster melee combos, as well as your character’s “Ultimate” ability – generally their most iconic “big” attack.
The power scaling of the show is thrown out, so if you want to defeat Buu with Chiaotzu, you can. There are strategies and defensive tactics worth learning, but spamming attacks will get you further than you might expect. This is big, flashy, silly fun – just like Dragon Ball itself. Hitting an opponent with a huge Kamehameha is exactly as satisfying as you’d want it to be.
The real appeal of Sparking! ZERO is getting to take part in some of the greatest moments from across the Dragon Ball canon in stunning, anime-accurate 3D. The story mode lets you play through the key beats of several central characters arcs, defeating the bad guys, sparring with the other warriors, and experiencing all the best moments from Dragon Ball Z and Super (GT and the original series are not represented here, although characters from these series are playable in the game).
The animations on the attacks really match up to the attacks from the show. Teen Gohan vs Cell feels accurate down to Gohan’s ultimate attack being the father/son Kamehameha wave; Goku and Vegeta’s fight is appropriately brutal; even Piccolo vs Freiza is accurate to the show. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, it’s worth knowing that the game assumes you’re carrying fond memories.The dialogue – from both the English and Japanese voice actors – matches up with the moments fans will remember, too.
The single player campaign also contains a handful of “what if” storylines, based on scenarios fans might well have considered over the years – like what would have happened if Goku hadn’t died fighting Raditz, or if Vegeta defeated Cell before he fused into his perfect form. Some of these result in a single cutscene, while others reward you with multi-part, considered storylines, exploring different outcomes and new scenarios. As a longtime fan, these remixed moments are great, and feel appropriate to the characters and world of Dragon Ball.
There are 182 characters in the game, but in typical Dragon Ball fashion, there’s a lot of overlap – there are 20 different iterations of Goku to choose from. To be fair, these are, kind of, distinctive Gokus – some might have access to his Spirit Bomb, or his Kaio-Ken, or other special moves he learns throughout the series. As you might expect, every character kind of plays, fundamentally, very similarly, with the same basic controls and a lot of overlap in their special moves. Surprisingly, there’s very few “deep cut” characters, and even some notable absences – which just speaks to how big Dragon Ball is.
The whole game overflows with love for the franchise. Specific character match-ups will get bespoke dialogue before a fight, and the choices of special attacks show a strong understanding of the show’s best iconography. Just holding down a trigger and seeing these characters yell as ki envelopes them is satisfying – and unlike the show, powering up never takes a full episode.
This isn’t the most well-balanced fighting game, and it definitely works much better as a playful experience for fans than it does as a serious competitive fighter – the few matches I found online were repetitive, with players repeatedly using a too-effective “teleport” technique that turns fights into matters of attrition more than skill. Still, if you’re mostly in it for the sake of living out Dragon Ball power fantasies and enjoying the characters, you’re unlikely to be bothered. I was more enticed by the mode that lets you make your own fight scenarios, complete with plots, and share them online – the offerings are full of fun ideas and Yamcha revenge plots.
It’s been a big, weird year for Dragon Ball, between this game, the launch of the Daima anime, the manga going into hiatus, and the tragic death of Akira Toriyama. Sparking! ZERO is the kind of game that speaks well to the fundamental appeal of the show – underneath all the large, powerful people smacking the snot out of each other, there’s style, heart, and a real sense of adventure.
Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO is available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. A review code was provided by the publisher.
James O’Connor has been writing about games since 2008. He is the author of Untitled Goose Game for Boss Fight Books.
