A lot has changed about both video games and the way we play them since the last mainline entry in the Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi series. As the first direct sequel since the PlayStation 2 generation, that means there’s something charming about Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero’s old school design and presentation compared to other fighting games on the market today. It’s tougher than Vegeta’s chest plate, and imbalanced in ways that are both annoying and lore accurate. Menus are labyrinthine, training tips are sparse and sometimes not very useful. But every battle is crafted with the sole purpose of putting the Dragon Ball fighting fantasy as it appears in the anime into our hands. The fast paced ki slinging, teleport kicking, and magical hair dying is great fun (when it’s not marred by responsiveness issues). The few areas Sparking! Zero does truly try to innovate, primarily with its branching story mode and create-your-own battles toolkit, are promising too. But playing this brawler can sometimes feel just as much like a labor of love as the effort to resurrect the series in the first place.
Arena fighters don’t have a lot in common with their traditional cousins like Tekken or Street Fighter. Instead of the fight taking place on a horizontal plane, they pair full 3D movement in largely open spaces with slimmed down movelists, trading technical complexity for spatial tactics. Tenkaichi further distanced itself from other games in its genre like Power Stone by turning up the speed, replacing throwable objects with big environmental features that can be blown up, and creating huge empty skies for wide open air combat. Other Dragon Ball games like the Xenoverse series have picked up the mantle of this particular form of arena brawling, but while both it and Tenkaichi capture the energy of Dragon Ball media – from how quickly characters can move the fight from air to ground, melee to ranged, and back again in these big beautiful spaces – the latter was always the more all-out experience without stamina bars and with tons of flair. Sparking! Zero certainly carries on that tradition.
At least in still frames, it’s undeniable how great characters and environments look. Every character, no matter what era of Dragon Ball they’re from, looks better than I remembered. In motion, things are a bit more dicey, with some cutscene animations in particular being awkwardly stiff. On the whole, the sound hits the mark as well. The raucous blasts of ki explosions and booming whooshes of Z Fighters flying at high speeds are ripped straight off of the screens of old TV episodes. Most of the iconic voices of the various series are recreated pitch perfectly by their original voice actors, too, which is an important detail to get right. (Although, in limited cases like Perfect Cell, even a returning cast member can make a change in line delivery that had me frantically googling to confirm that my memory hadn’t been punched into a cliffside by old age.)
Another win for my inner child was the truly immense roster. More than 180 fighters pulled from every nook and cranny of the series are playable, many needing to be unlocked first via the shop or story modes. There are so many folks on this roster from shows or movies I haven’t watched in ages (or in some cases, at all) that I had to wonder why the very few that didn’t make the cut got snubbed. Many of these characters are repeated in some fashion – there are 19 versions of Goku, for example – but they aren’t all simply reskins. They can have different special techniques and transformation trees, meaning base level Goku from the Saiyan invasion days has a different set of moves and much lower upside than Buu Saga or Super-era Goku, who can transform into various technicolor versions of Super Saiyan. These abilities can’t be changed, but I could modify each warrior with ability items that boost things like attack power and health, though I barely noticed any benefit at all when doing so.
The controls are universal for all characters, but some on the roster interact with the standard systems slightly differently than others, which is an appreciated layer of nuance. For example, Android characters can’t actively regain their ki in order to launch blast attacks, while gigantic characters like Janemba can’t be grabbed. Sparking! Zero makes no attempt to balance these differences, either; every time I was forced to fight a character that was canonically stronger than mine in the manga or anime, they were just as oppressive in-game as I’d expect. I didn’t always like that, but I respect the commitment.
Unfortunately, the bar to execute the varied techniques of its diverse cast is very high and extremely frustrating. Inputs are simple overall, but early on I often felt lost when combat picked up the pace. Part of that is admittedly on me – the last entry of this series I played with fervor, but that was right after Barack Obama was elected. The fast pace of Sparking! Zero compared to Tenkaichi 3 mixed with a lax tutorial system threw my 17-years-older reaction speed out of the ring with ease. But even beyond that, things like the timing on nailing teleporting defenses or the various applications of some of the directional rush combo enders had me praying to Shenron for mercy.
I’ve spent a lot of time traveling back and forth between regular fights and the training mode to check and double check my understanding of when and how to use these techniques, but it hasn’t really helped me execute them consistently in battle. Also, compared to modern day fighting games, Sparking! Zero’s training options are rudimentary at best. There’s no expectation to layout frame data and hitboxes in a less competitively-focused game like this, but targeted drills or a more nuanced customization of CPU behaviors would go a long way to help beginners and returning players fly up to the high skill floor.
The skill points system is at least a welcome tool to your combat belt. As you do damage and gain energy, a meter will charge that grants a skill point every time it fills. There’s a handful of ways to spend these points, the most common being on the unique skills each brawler has – that could be an ability that fully charges the ki meter for Vegito or Yajirobe’s health restoring Senzu Beans. But points also need to be spent carefully on transformations and the new revenge counter system, which let me satisfyingly counterpunch foes while in the middle of a combo against me. An enhanced version of the perception counter from older games, called “super perception” here, allows you to block just about every kind of attack so long as you time it well and have a skill point to spend, too. The window for execution is razor thin and can be a bear to learn, but these are life saving options – and like ki, which is also used for a variety of offensive and defensive maneuvers, the resource management decisions you have to make on a moment-to-moment basis really add a welcome bit of strategy to an otherwise frantic fighter.
There is definitely an old school approach to a lot of the progression systems and menus of Sparking! Zero. There’s a long list of achievements that can be checked off organically just by playing, which usually grant in-game currency called Zeni, items, or other light cosmetics. Just about everything can be bought with Zeni – from new characters to costumes to soundtracks and even CPU attack behaviors – and you get this cash at a healthy rate that never felt like I was being pressured to spend real money for any of it. There are microtransactions, like a $35 season pass covering three packs of characters, and two $15 music packs, but I didn’t see any option to buy them without leaving the action and going to the storefront directly, a rarity in 2024.
On the flip side, so many of the menus are a hassle to navigate, often taking you all the way back to the top layer instead of letting you go back one screen at a time. For example, you can customize characters’ abilities and costumes to be used in all modes, but those modes don’t have paths to the customization screen within them, so you have to exit one completely and go the long way to make adjustments. This was barely acceptable in 2005, and we certainly don’t have to live like this anymore.
The flagship single-player mode is called Episode Battles, which is a truncated retelling of the biggest Dragon Ball stories from various characters’ perspectives. Just about every Dragon Ball game has done this in some form or fashion, but this rather exhaustive version does a good job at keeping time between battles short, and prioritizing the important moments versus making you play every single skirmish (as Tenkaichi 3 did).
The standout feature this time around, though, is that certain events can actually be cleverly changed for sometimes dramatic new outcomes. That could involve making a choice during a cutscene, like I did when I decided to have Goku help Piccolo against Cell instead of waiting for Vegeta and Trunks to complete their training, which is the opposite of what went down in the TV show years ago. That lets you prevent the Cell Games from ever occurring, providing a cool glimpse at a “what if?” future where the androids live in peace with Goku and his allies.
This clear choice is way easier to execute than the other, more frequent method you are given for an opportunity to alter events, which usually involves winning battles in specific ways to change their outcomes. Besides the fact that, and I must reiterate, these fights can be very difficult since powerful characters can become all but immune to your normal attacks and will always have the perfect defense to match your offense, it’s unclear upfront what conditions must be met to unlock these alternative stories. You can lower the difficulty on a fight-by-fight basis in order to progress if you really need to, but these special tasks must be completed on the standard difficulty, making finding them very much an endgame activity. But I did really appreciate the effort to spice up stories that have been rehashed ad nauseam.
There are also custom battles, which exist somewhere between Mario Maker and the Universe Mode in a WWE game. Using a tool box full of special modifiers that limit what characters can and can’t do in a given scenario, as well as some triggers that help program particular outcomes after conditions are met, these battles can potentially resemble more of a puzzle than just mashing digital action figures together in dream situations. There’s a shoddy system for putting together dialogue so that some sort of narrative can be added to them, but the best it can do is loosely set up the make-believe stakes. I had no plans to write my own entire Dragon Ball arc, but I’m not sure the tool is up to the task even if I wanted to.
There are quite a few custom battles made by developer Spike Chunsoft baked in, and they don’t really stretch the imagination that much. A few of them present interesting scenarios and specific parameters for victory, like seeing Kid Goku spar with a Master Roshi who can only be beaten by the kamehameha. But I haven’t come across an “a-ha!” creation that really shows me the potential for this mode yet.
Sparking! Zero at least seems to break the Tenkaichi curse of truly abysmal online multiplayer by supplying some solid network play. When wired up, I found minimal latency and lag issues on the live servers, or at least not enough to blame it for me dropping a combo or missing a parry. There is a local split-screen option for people who want to duke it out in person, but it’s disappointingly limited to one stage: the white void of the Hyperbolic Time Chamber. Even still, playing Sparking! Zero with real people that you can hit with a dramatic one liner or a guttural power-up scream is still the best way to do it, by far.
Online modes are pretty straight forward, but the DP battle stands out as the most interesting way to play. It constricts your up-to-five-member teams by assigning a point value to every member of the roster, giving you 15 points maximum to split between them. Stronger characters are more expensive, so you could keep your team small and full of high-cost heavy hitters like the Kais or furry SSJ4 Saiyans, or hope a full host of cheaper characters like Krillin and Yamcha can overwhelm the opponent. I liked starting with a character’s cheaper base form, knowing that with decent play I would be able to transform them into the stronger forms over time, the early discount coming at the risk of getting beat down before I can get my power up to speed. That extra angle of strategy is something that takes good advantage of the untuned nature of a lot of these characters, and really doesn’t exist anywhere else in the genre.
