Perfect Cell descends into city ruins and lands with a signature smirk and taunting pose, eying his soon-to-be opponent, Third Form Frieza. The two size each other up and exchange appropriately goofy barbs about who wields more power as the camera cuts dramatically, the music swells and they collide. A brief title card declaring this the battle for Earth, a rapid series of blows and then, in the aftermath as Frieza kneels, they throw pithy one-liners at each other once again. The kicker, of course, is that these two characters never existed at the same time in Dragon Ball Z, but using the tools Sparking! Zero gave me, I was able to, at least somewhat, approximate a short scene between them for no other reason than I thought it would be cool.
It’s been seventeen years since the last time Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi graced consoles with its celebratory exploration of the immensely popular Dragon Ball franchise. A series tailormade for video-game adaptation, its iconic and eccentric character designs from the late great Akira Toriyama were matched only by its blistering focus on extravagantly scaled fights and world-ending arcs. It rules, basically, and developer Spike Chunsoft is picking up the mantle once again, and the time away hasgiven birth to a whole host of new ideas and returning fan favourites.
Sparking! Zero has a kind of holistic charm, a game so full of small touches and loving homages that it’s difficult to single out any one thing from the roughly two hours I spent poking at its edges. It starts at the top level, with elements like UI and menu animations being clearly aimed at players who will get a thrill out of things like Goku launching himself between different anime locations and stages to signify different menus. Landing amid friends and foes as crisp selection menus fill the screen, it sets the stage immediately for Sparking! Zero’s truest intent— a celebration of all things Dragon Ball Z.
Given its eye-catching visuals and brand recognition, Sparking! Zero’s tutorilisation seems keenly aware of its near two-decade absence from the market and the literal generation of new players that could be picking it up upon its return. As someone who isn’t well versed in the fighting game space, let alone one with this degree of movement and playspace freedom, onboarding is crucial and Sparking! Zero eased me in nicely. Choose a stage I recognised from the show, set me up against a passive Mr. Satan who’s happy to take a beating, and slowly introduce me to the plethora of options available in combat.
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If you’ve played the Budokai Tenkaichi titles before this will likely feel familiar but for the uninitiated, Sparking! Zero takes the principles of a 2D fighter and blows them wide open with full 3D play spaces. This is in part an excellent means of capturing the spirit of the anime as the game can deploy a series of rapid camera cuts or massive, arena-spanning animations to emulate how it felt to watch titans clash on alien worlds. Only now, you’re (mostly) in control of it all and while the ceiling for skilled players will likely require Saiyan strength to reach, the moment-to-moment is casually approachable and engaging.
Maneuvering your hero (or villain) of choice around the battlefield is a fairly intuitive affaire, making full use of the space you can hover up or down and use a speed boost to cover great distances while flying toward, or searching for, your opponent. Once engaged in fisticuffs, you’ll volley light and heavy attacks with a smattering or ranged options, all while taking time to block, parry, and charge your Ki meter by holding down the left bumper. This puts your character into the classic “AHHHHHH” state, replete with glowing energy and tensed biceps and fists. Ki is then used to deploy special attacks, ranging from half-charged to full depending on their requirements and subsequent damage.
Again, it’s a rise and fall of tensions that feels good enough for a newcomer to pick up while deeper tactical and skilled play simmers just beneath the surface. Getting to let loose a quick Solar Flare to momentarily evade attack or, naturally, blast a Kamehameha, always felt cool, doubly so for having had to take the time in between precarious blows to charge my own Ki. The flip side is that a move like the Kamehameha also required some extremely quick thinking aiming to land with effectiveness, a somewhat cumbersome targeting experience I couldn’t quite grapple with during my brief time. Likewise, the game’s parry window feels exceptionally tight to these fresh eyes, a simple block is nice and easy but the dramatic flare and cinematics of a parry ask more of the player than I had anticipated.
It was difficult to linger on these pain points, either because of my inexperience with the genre making it tough to nail down where the line between skill and game was crossing, but also because the act of just hanging out in Sparking! Zero was consistently so satisfying. The roster of characters to choose from is frankly dizzying (I only didn’t recognise like four of them, please clap for this aging DBZ fan) and many of them contain multiple transformations to adhere to various states as seen in the series. Likewise, combat is elevated by destructible environments that crumble around your fights as your characters get visibly bloodier and more battered as it goes on. Small touches, yes, but ones that add up to make the experience more than the sum of its parts.
Those parts do rule though, as combat is bolstered by two major play modes, alongside the usual assortment of tournament and multiplayer. The first is a greatest hits mix of major story moments from the series, played out across eight different character perspectives and allowing you to fight through story beats and even make some choices to impact them. In my demo, I was able to witness the huge dickheadedness of Radditz and Vegeta from the perspective of Goku and Piccolo, and while the condensed versions of these stories seemingly don’t offer much beyond “oh neat” it is still in fact kinda neat.
Sparking! Zero’s greatest neat trick is in its editing suite though, as you’re invited to effectively craft your own moments and battles through an extensive creation mode, broken down into Simple and Normal Edit. Simple is as it sounds, a stripped-back version of the full set of tools available in Normal, including a limited roster, but is a great place to get your feet wet in what is otherwise a fairly overwhelming range of options. Edit gives you full control over a fight from opening cutscene to closing— and I do mean full. I touched on it earlier how I was able to rip characters from across time and plot to fight like my personal toy box but getting to that moment gave me hundreds of small choices to envision and execute as I saw fit.
Everything from the lines of dialogue to the camera angles to the music and character poses can be customised in the editing suite, giving you the ability to fully create cutscenes from scratch with tools that are mostly intuitive, if slightly clunky at times. My highlight was getting to design the splash title card that would precede every episode of the anime, though as far as I could tell I could only fill this space with predetermined words and phrases (there are LOADS of them but I would like the chance to write some stupid shit of my own in its place). Meanwhile, fights can be manipulated to a granular level; say I want to inject some dramatic tension into the exchange, I can implement trigger rules to play that gives my opponent a boost of Ki energy or health once they drop to a certain percentage of either, or give me the chance to rise from the dead if I’m KO’d. It’s impossible for me to truly unpack these options given how short a window I had with the game but this feels like an excellent toybox for the Dragon Ball sickos if there ever was one.
It’s just all so damn cool and fun to play around with, the finer details of Sparking! Zero’s fighting mechanics and true depth of customisation are to be unpacked when the game releases next month by people with a far keener eye for it than me. But inexperience couldn’t dull what was an otherwise charming and compelling few hours exploring places I’d adored as a child in front of CheeseTV, smashing figures of my favourite characters together and getting to feel even marginally in control of the kind of massive scale battles I would watch with bated breath. Someone else can tell you if Dragon Ball Z: Sparking! Zero is the iterative fighting game you want, for now, I just want to show you how sick it is.
DRAGON BALL: Sparking! ZERO is out on October 11th for PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC. The cheapest copy is $99 with free shipping from Amazon.
