The passing of legendary mangaka Akira Toriyama earlier this year forced me to weigh the importance of his work in my life. After all, my older brother had all but forced Saturday morning cartoons on me, including anime like Dragon Ball and its successors, Z and GT. But it goes beyond even the shows. For nearly as long as I’ve been consciously playing video games, Dragon Ball has followed me there too. I played the Legacy of Goku games on the Game Boy Advance back in the day, as well as the overlooked Dragon Ball Origins franchise on the Nintendo DS. And of course, like many of you, I played a number of the arena-fighting games that were released on home consoles throughout the 2000s, like the Budokai Tenkaichi subseries.
Well, after a long hiatus, the true-blue arena fighters are back with Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero, an immense game befitting of its ridiculous moniker, which finally adopts the series’”Sparking” subtitle from Japan. Boasting a roster of 182 characters and counting (as there will be a few waves of DLC characters) Sparking Zero feels like the perfect encapsulation of everything the franchise has come to stand for over the decades. It’s unfortunate that Toriyama-san couldn’t be around to see it finished, because I think he’d be overjoyed to see how teeming with love for this world Sparking Zero appears to be.
Dragon Ball has always been synonymous with growth, so it’s no surprise that after such a long time in the proverbial Hyperbolic Time Chamber, Sparking Zero has emerged stuffed full of every character and reference the developers could possibly squeeze in. The full roster has characters I’ve never even heard of, which isn’t too surprising given how I dropped off of the shows as a kid. Still, who the fuck are half of these weirdos, like Cabba or Hirudegarn, and how great is it that they’re all here for novices and lapsed fans like myself to learn about?
The fan service hardly stops there. Sparking Zero also includes a story mode that drops you into the literal first-person perspective of iconic characters and even lets you customize your own “dream” scenario. You can pick the combatants and the music, and even stylize the cutscene in an editor and then share it online for others to see. When you aren’t making your own Dragon Ball AMVs, though, Sparking Zero seems to bring back the destructive clashes of the older games, allowing fighters of hilariously unbalanced power levels to utterly raze arenas to the ground while they instant teleport and backhand one another in the skies above. I’m reluctant to say this too often, but we are so goddamn back.
Here’s what others are saying about Sparking Zero after some extensive previews of the game’s various modes and huge roster, as well as a chance to talk with its producer, Jun Furutani.
To call Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero an ambitious title would be an understatement, and it all starts with the character-select screen, which takes an absurd amount of time to scroll through. My biggest point of reference to this point, the Budokai franchise, maxed out at just over 40 characters in one game, but Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero delivers 181 characters in the base game. An additional preorder character brings that roster up to 182 playable characters, and that’s still all before any potential post-launch additions.
That number surpasses even the massive Budokai Tenkaichi 3 roster, which featured more than 150 characters. “Since Budokai Tenkaichi 3: Sparking Meteor, it’s been a long time, and there was a huge roster for that,” Furutani says. “Since it has been such a long time, we couldn’t really reuse those assets that we had in the past, so we had to kind of start from scratch. Adding all these characters has been very difficult, but I think the Budokai Tenkaichi series is all about being able to enjoy the Dragon Ball world through the eyes of the different characters, so we wanted to go above and beyond what Budokai Tenkaichi 3 did, which is why we decided to go with this roster size. We want people to enjoy the newest and best version of the series.”
Dragon Ball Sparking Zero is a genuine shock to the system. It’s been a long time since we had a good arena fighter, but this game brings out all the reasons players fell in love with Budokai. For Bandai Namco and Capcom, the last few years of the fighting renaissance have been about revitalizing franchises to rebuild the past and swing open the door for new fans. This isn’t a bad thing, and it’s made both Street Fighter VI and Tekken 8 smash hits with new audiences while balancing keeping their respective existing player base excited and engaged.
Still, everything about Dragon Ball Sparking Zero is a love letter to the arena fight series that changed the game. It’s unapologetically loud and campy. The characters are intelligently designed and balanced thoughtfully. More importantly, many of the characters on the 182-long roster feel like a swing for the fences. This is a bold game that pushes to give Dragon Ball fans what they want and reminds fighting game players why Budokai was the blueprint to begin with.
Producer Jun Furutani told me that when selecting the battles that they wanted to highlight in Episode Mode, they wanted to focus on the battles that highlighted the playable characters the best in the story, but they also wanted to put a focus on battles that could potentially lead to branching outcomes.
I followed up and asked Furutani about how substantial these branches could be, to which he replied, “It’s a really hard question to answer because depending on which branch we’re talking about, it could skew very in a completely different direction. But some branches might just go back to the actual canonical route again. For example, when you fight Raditz, there’s some smaller branches that have been there, but it takes you back to the canonical route. And obviously after Raditz is Vegeta and after Vegeta is Frieza. Some of them are just blips, some of them kind of take you in a very drastically different direction.””
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Beyond the Custom and Episode Battle modes, I also messed around with the tournament mode, which allows you to participate in one of many different types of tournaments, each with different rule sets. The Tournament of Power, for example, has you competing on the Tournament of Power stage with flight turned off and ringouts as an alternate win condition; Cell Games is a strictly 1v1 affair with no rules, but you only regain 20% of your life between fights; and Yamcha Games is straight chaos with random rules and random character selection. You can also create your own tournament and customize your very own set of rules as well.
There’s an ebb and flow to how combat plays out in Sparking! ZERO, a kind of satisfying rhythm that emerges as you cycle through your melee attacks, Kamehamehas, Special Beam Cannons, or whatever else is at your disposal. A big part of that, and something I can’t overstate, is how much faster this game feels than any other Dragon Ball fighter. This is the closest a Dragon Ball game has ever come to making me feel like I was truly playing a fight from the anime, and that’s only bolstered by the phenomenal presentation.
Rocks, hills, and buildings get demolished in the wake of your fight, the landscape gets cracked and bruised, and your character’s outfits get wear and tear. The sheer amount of destruction you cause in every fight is staggering, and Bandai Namco has done an incredible job with DRAGON BALL: Sparking! ZERO‘s animations. When some of those special attacks get used you could honestly not be blamed for thinking it’s a frame from the anime.
Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero launches October 11, 2024 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and PC via Steam.