Dragon Ball Sparking Zero Hands-On Preview: Rock the Dragon

Every year, like clockwork, I used to get the flu. Didn’t matter whether I got a flu shot, or if I stayed away from people who were sick, or anything else. Whatever I did, I got the flu. And I got it bad. Like “bedridden for two weeks” bad. Once, I remember my dad, who was a submariner and spent half the year at sea, asking if there was anything he could do. I said that there was a new Dragon Ball game for the PS2 that I wanted to play, and maybe we could rent it from Blockbuster (I know, I’m older than dirt). My dad, though, did one better, and bought the game up. I spent all day hanging out with him and playing it. It’s a good memory.

The game in question was Dragon Ball Z: Budokai 2, and it sparked a long-running love for the Budokai and Budokai Tenkaichi series. So when Bandai Namco gave me the opportunity to sit down with Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero, the fourth game in the Budokai Tenkaichi series and the first in 17 years, I immediately said yes. And after spending three hours of hands-on time with it behind closed doors, Dragon Ball fans, I think we might be back.

Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero

Release Date: October 11, 2024

• Windows
• PlayStation 5Buy
• Xbox SeriesBuy

A Battle (System) for the Ages

First things first: if you’ve played the Budokai Tenkaichi games before, you’ll be right at home in Sparking Zero. All the things that made those games interesting are here. There’s a massive roster here - 181 characters in the base roster plus one you’ll snag if you preorder the game - from every era of Dragon Ball.

Of course, the standard Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z characters are here, and there are several rows of Gokus and Vegetas if you’re into that, but the real good stuff is the deep cuts. You want characters from GT? They’re here. Looking for characters like Whis, Beerus, Hit, Broly, Caulifla, Kale, and Jiren from Super? Present and accounted for, along with some lesser-known picks like Bergamo and Ribrianne. Maybe you just wanna goof around with Yajirobe or Spopovich. You can do that. My favorite inclusions, though, are from the non-canon movies from back in the day. That means you can duke it out with Bojack, Lord Slug, the original Broly, and Android 13 if you want.

There’s a lot here, and every character is different in subtle ways. A lot of my early hands-on time with Sparking Zero was spent in the tutorial just coming to grips with its systems. Thankfully, it’s pretty excellent, and I was up to speed in no time. Like its predecessors, Sparking Zero is an arena fighter, but that doesn’t mean there’s no depth here. Whether you’re chaining together combos, charging attacks to break through your opponent’s guard, setting up a throw, managing your ki, or just positioning yourself on the field, there’s a lot to think about.

Here’s an example: I figured out how to chain a basic combo into a launcher, dash after the other character after I’d sent them flying, and then land some more hits before finishing things off with one of my character’s unique energy blasts. This combo doesn’t work for every character, however – Frieza’s Barrage Death Beam, for instance, probably won’t land because it’s multiple hits and a little slow – so you’ll have to make tweaks depending on who you’re playing, and I found several combos that were unique to those characters because of how their attacks work.

There are also a lot of cool little variances here. You can vanish behind your opponent before reappearing for an attack, dodge an incoming hit by timing things right, pull off counters (which require you to hold a button, opening you up to throws), deflect your opponent’s ki blasts, and so on.

One of my favorite things was the ability to transform or fuse with other characters mid-match. You can select any version of a character from the character select screen, so you can totally start off as Super Saiyan Blue Vegito if that’s your bag, but you can also put the right versions of Goku and Vegeta on a team together and fuse them during combat if you can build up enough Skill Points during battle, which is really cool.

Simultaneously, you can start as a powered-up version of a character, or select them in their base form and work your way up to the big leagues. And if you’re really looking for something different, you can play as the absolutely humongous characters like the overpowering Great Ape Vegeta, the very silly Giant Lord Slug, or the absolutely goofy, rotund Janemba.

Get Busy Sparking or Get Busy Dying

The big highlight, though, is probably Sparking mode, where you overcharge your ki and spend a Skill Point to enter a temporary mode that substantially boosts your combo possibilities and gives you access to each character’s Ultimate Blast, a cinematic attack that really piles on the hurt. Sparking Zero is a gorgeous game, but Ultimate Blasts are where you really start to see how much care and attention has been put into making sure everything looks just right. My favorite example is probably during Vegito’s Final Kamehameha, where both Goku’s and Vegeta’s faces are superimposed over Vegito’s before it switches back to Vegito just as he fires off his Ultimate Blast. It’s awesome, and really sells the whole Dragon Ball feel.

Another thing that sells it? This game isn’t worried about being balanced. Jun Furutani, Sparking Zero’s producer, told me that they wanted this to be “a true Dragon Ball experience,” and that means that some characters are just going to be stronger than others. “If you’re playing Broly or Perfect Cell, you’re going to be strong, especially if you’re fighting one of the weaker characters,” he said.

That said, the development team is attempting to maintain some semblance of parity in the online ranked matches, which will assign each character a certain number of points, known as DP, and have a DP cap per team, so you can’t just go hog-wild with an overpowered team online.

That attention to detail regarding character strength also extends to the more lore-important battles, and you’ll see special interactions during those fights. “If you’re fighting Perfect Cell as Super Saiyan 2 Teen Gohan and you throw Perfect Cell, there's going to be a different throw, just because of the canonical ramifications of these two fighting each other. And it's not just those two. There's a lot of those interactions in the game that happen throughout,” Furutani told me.

It’s Over 9000!

Sparking Zero feels great on the battlefield and nails the presentation, but it’s not just about looking pretty and punching hard. There are also just a ton of ways to play it. You’ve got World Tournament mode, which lets you set up, well… tournament brackets that you can play through solo or with friends. You can even use the rules from the World Martial Arts Tournament or the Tournament of Power, which is a nice touch.

Then there’s Episode Battle, which serves as Sparking Zero’s story mode. I got to play a bit of the story for both Goku and Frieza, and they’re about what you’d expect. You relive the Dragon Ball story from the perspective of that character, but there are nice little touches. For instance, when Piccolo showed up to help Goku out against Raditz, I had the option to turn him down. I ended up rolling with him because that’s what happens in the story, but if you don’t, Krillin comes with you instead. It’s a neat “what if?” scenario, and I’m excited to see how these play out in other stories.

In Frieza’s, I got to be an absolute monster, just tearing through Z Fighter after Z Fighter as they lined up to get worked. That is… until I ran into Super Saiyan Goku, who cleaned my clock so fast I wondered if somebody got the number of that yellow-haired truck. The long and short of it, then, is that Episode Battle is cool, and fights that should be challenging are actually challenging. That’s great.

I think the coolest thing Sparking Zero has to offer, though, might be Custom Battles. Here, you can set up custom sequences where you pit characters against one another, complete with custom cutscenes, text-based dialogue, custom poses, win and loss screens, the whole nine yards. There’s even some pre-built Bonus Battles from the development team to play so you can see how all of it works.

I played one where a young Goku had to train against Master Roshi and finish the fight with a Kamehameha, and it was a lot of fun, so I can only imagine what you'll be able to create when you can play with it as long as you like. Your options aren’t limitless; you’re restricted to an (admittedly quite large) number of words and phrases, so things might sound awkward from time to time, but there’s still an enormous amount of options here, and I can’t wait to dig more deeply into it and see what I can make. Best of all, once you clear a custom fight, you can share it online with other people.

My time with Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero was something of a whirlwind. Even with three hours of playtime, I barely scratched the surface of what’s on offer here. There’s just so much to see and master, whether you’re talking mechanics or modes. I got up from a demo station the way you get up from a seven-course meal. Stuffed, happy, and kinda sad I didn’t have room for more, but knowing what I wanted to try the very next time I came back. We’ve been waiting for a game like Sparking Zero for a long, long time, and based on my time with it, it looks like it’s doing almost everything right. Or, maybe more simply, it’s the kind of game a much younger Will would be very happy to chill and play while he was hanging out with his dad – even if he had the flu.