Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero has been out for a few weeks now and it seems to be going over well with fans, who’ve been waiting a very long time for a new fighting game based on the hugely popular anime. The recently released fighter is the first installment in the long-dormant Budokai Tenkaichi subseries in years, and abandons the old title to instead adopt the “Sparking” designation that the series has always used in Japan, which was lifted from the lyrics of Dragon Ball Z’s opening theme song, “Cha-La Head-Cha-La.” If the endless references haven’t already suggested as much, Sparking Zero is a grand homage to the arena fighters that many of us grew up loving, the iconic shonen manga and anime that shaped our tastes, and the late-and-great man who brought it all to us, Akira Toriyama.
Appropriately, Sparking Zero tries to fit a lot in. Its roster dwarfs those of every other game in the multimedia franchise, capping out at 182 playable characters. Granted, about 20 of them are variants on Goku, and other popular characters have alternate forms as well, but that’s still an incredible number, and Sparking Zero makes the most of it, pulling from all of the franchise’s history. That means there are beloved characters and references from series like the original and Dragon Ball Z, as well as folks like Pan and Omega Shenron from Dragon Ball GT, which most fans don’t look back on as favorably as the former. The developers are only going to keep adding characters too, which I reckon will cover more of Dragon Ball Super, and could even grow to include the newest show, Dragon Ball Daima. This isn’t even its final form!
Since the release of Sparking Zero, fans have been celebrating the return of their favorite frenetic arena fighters. Though there have been countless fighting games in the Dragon Ball series over the years, many of them have taken slightly different shapes since the last Budokai Tenkaichi installment, like the Xenoverse RPGs, as well as the gorgeous 2D-fighter FighterZ. Sparking Zero has been received with general acclaim, but the praise is tinged with a heavy dose of nostalgia. Until it was announced, I think many had given up on the series, and the comeback has been received like a long overdue hug, especially in light of Toriyama’s passing earlier this year.
You can see a lot of the love for the game, Toriyama, and the series in the Steam reviews I’ve been poring over. The Dragon Ball fanbase is one of the most raucous collectives I’ve ever known, and their adoration for the franchise, as well as their humor, is pretty singular. Unfortunately, despite the acclaim, Sparking Zero’s got issues that even the most diehard fan is having trouble looking past. The story mode, which features branching what-if possibilities, has been knocked for being particularly shallow and featuring some glaring gaps, but some players have also had a bad time with Sparking Zero’s enemy AI beyond just Great Ape Vegeta wiping the floor with them. The biggest concern among the community, however, is the state of Sparking Zero’s online play, which sounds pretty busted. Lots of reviews are currently parroting the error message that players are getting, and a few weeks in, that infrastructure still sounds like it needs some fine-tuning to get to a reliably playable place.
Still, the overwhelming majority of reviews are packed with love and admiration for the scope of Sparking Zero and its cavalcade of fan service. It sounds like it’s a few quality-of-life patches away from being the best Dragon Ball game ever made, and I desperately hope it gets there sooner rather than later. In the meantime, here’s a peek at what folks are saying about Sparking Zero on Steam.