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Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO Review – An Explosive Love Letter

Francesco De Meo • Oct 18, 2024 at 07:00 AM EDT

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Game Info

Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO

October 11th, 2024

Platform

PC (Steam), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S

Publisher

Bandai Namco

Developer

Spike Chunsoft

2024 will go down in history as the saddest year for every Dragon Ball fan, as it was the year the series' legendary creator Akira Toriyama passed away. Without this tragic event, however, the year would have been remembered as a great one for the franchise as a whole, not only thanks to the release of the Dragon Ball Daima series but also to the return of the beloved Budokai Tenkaichi franchise. Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO is one of the best games based on the works of Toriyama-sensei ever made. Right from the start, it is clear how Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO is a labor of love. From its presentation to its gameplay, Spike Chunsoft created a love letter to the series that every fan is sure to appreciate, even if they are not keen to play against others, whether online or offline, with the series' classic split-screen mode making a return, albeit in a very limited fashion.

Unlike many modern fighting games, Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO has a robust selection of single-player and offline modes, with Episode Battle and Custom Battle modes being the show's stars.

Episode Battle is the game's main story mode. After selecting a character between Goku, Vegeta, Piccolo, Future Trunks, Frieza, Goku Black, and Jiren, players can play through their stories and experience the intense battles they took part in the manga and TV show. Goku's story is obviously the longest, covering the entirety of Dragon Ball Z and Dragon Ball Super story arcs, culminating in the explosive Tournament of Power, but even the other characters offer enough fights to make them quite enjoyable.

Although the narration is unsurprisingly extremely abridged, Episode Battle mode is made interesting by some branching paths that allow players to experience several what-if scenarios, including Sparking Episodes, which significantly alter the original storyline in some interesting ways. These scenarios go from Goku refusing Piccolo's help in the fight against Raditz to him becoming a Super Saiyan much earlier than in the final confrontation against Frieza on Namek, just to name the first two scenarios that are encountered in Goku's story to avoid massive spoilers. As a long-time fan of the franchise, I have thoroughly enjoyed these scenarios, and I expect other fans like myself will do the same as well.

Staying true to the hardcore nature of the Budokai Tenkaichi series, some of the fights in Episode Battle mode can be extremely challenging, so even experienced players have plenty of reason to play through this mode, although there are times when the CPU seems to be a little powerful and makes short work of players who don't use the game's best defensive mechanics properly, as made evident in the fight against Great Ape Vegeta. In some ways, Custom Battle mode is the culmination of these what-if scenarios included in Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO. This mode allows players to create their own unique battles, complete with dialogue, using a variety of different elements and conditions. Better yet, these custom scenarios can be shared online with other players, and many of those already available stretch the possibilities offered by the game to some very interesting limits.

These modes wouldn't matter much if Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO wouldn't be fun to play, but thankfully, that is not the case. Like its predecessors, the new entry in the series is an arena fighting game that plays very differently from games more in line with traditional fighting games like Dragon Ball FighterZ. Controlling one of the many, many characters available in the roster, players can traverse big 3D arenas and unleash their destructive Ki attacks to destroy elements of the battlefield and alter it significantly during the course of a game. The vast majority of mechanics seen in the Budokai Tenkaichi returns in the game with some well-realized improvements. Perception mechanics, which allow a fighter to avoid and quickly counter a short-range attack, for example, have been enhanced with perfect perception, a new mechanic that opens the opponent more than the regular perception by pressing the dedicated button right before an attack connects.

Each character's combat option has also been expanded by the introduction of a Skill system. During a match, characters will gain Skill Points over time, which can be used to unleash a variety of Skills ranging from power-up moves, such as Kaioken for Goku, to other useful maneuvers, such as Instant Transmission. Skill points are also used for Transformations and Fusions if the correct characters are part of the same team and for enabling the powerful Sparking Mode, an ultra-powered up state achieved by filling the Ki bar twice that grants access to extended melee strings and a powerful Ultimate Blast attack that deals a ton of damage. All this, combined with the unique combo strings of the over 180 characters of the base roster and the light customization options granted by special unlockable items, makes Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO a rather deep fighting game where all sorts of players will find the right character for their fighting style.

Unfortunately, the game isn't an extremely balanced experience, which is to be expected, considering the developers were not looking to create a competitive-focused experience in the vein of Dragon Ball FighterZ and other traditional fighting games. Some characters are, without question, much stronger than others, and little can the unique Destruction Points system do to really balance things out. Each character in the game is assigned a DP value representative of their strength, with the 10 DP characters like Blue Vegito, Blue Gogeta, Super Saiyan 4 Gogeta, Beerus, and Whis being the absolute best.

As players have a limited DP capacity for putting together their teams, they cannot have all of the best characters in their teams so as to give lower-DP characters a fighting chance. The reality, however, is much different. Jumping into the online ranked mode is essentially an endless sequence of fights against the 10 DP characters and some 9 and 8 DP characters like Ultra Instinct Goku, Super Saiyan Broly, and a few others, so to really have a fighting chance, players are essentially forced to use only a fraction of the massive roster.

With Sparking Mode being so powerful and easy to activate, and the Z Counter, the vanish maneuver that allows characters to avoid attacks by pressing the block button right before an attack connects, being the superior defense mechanic thanks to its low Ki cost, high reward nature, games often become a little stale, although the additional defensive and offensive mechanics the game offers make quite a difference in high-level play. The online mode, powered by delay-based netcode, works reasonably well with players using a proper wired connection, although the experience is right now plagued by a massive amount of rage quitters who leave a match right before defeat due to the currently light punishment they receive for their bad conduct.

It is undeniable that there's a certain degree of complexity in the Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO experience, which makes the game incredibly fun once fully exploited, but it's also undeniable how those coming from much simpler games like the Dragon Ball Xenoverse series will feel overwhelmed. The game does an excellent job explaining every little nuance of the combat mechanics in the in-game tutorials, but I feel the starting tutorial should have been a little more in-depth to better ease newcomers to the experience. Much like the entirety of the menu system, the tutorial mode also feels a little clunky, so there's definitely room for improvement in this regard. Still, the love the development team has put into the creation of the game is evident as soon as the game starts, and every surprising interaction between characters, every what-if scenario, and every recreation of the most epic sequences of the story makes it easy to see past some of the game's shortcomings.

Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO easily delivers when it comes to visuals, with some caveats. The cel-shaded character models look incredible, as do the destructible arenas and the special effects flying all over as soon as a fight starts. To be honest, I feel there is some visual clutter in some instances that makes it difficult to understand what is going on, but this is Dragon Ball we are talking about, so it was fully expected. Also, the animations sometimes are very stiff and leave something to be desired, especially in the pre-rendered sequences.

Speaking specifically about the PC version of the game, it comes with a variety of visual settings to tweak, and I did not have trouble running at the 60 FPS cap at 4K resolution, max settings on my system (i7-13700F, RTX 4080, 32 GB RAM). Like almost every Unreal Engine 5 release to date, Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO suffers from stuttering issues, although the experience becomes way smoother once the shaders have been compiled. There's some stuttering here and there while traversing big chunks of the arenas, but they're thankfully minor and not that frequent, so they are easy to ignore.

Though the experience has some flaws, Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO is, without a doubt, one of the best games based on Akira Toriyama's legendary series, thanks to the great amount of care Spike Chunsoft put into not only adapting the explosive fights and the memorable characters of the series but also into creating new story content that fans will undoubtedly love. There really could have been no better tribute to the life and the works of one of the most celebrated Japanese mangaka of all time.

PC version tested. Review code provided by the publisher.

WCCFTECH RATING