Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero aims to capture the wild, acrobatic, over-the-top battles of the anime and its various iterations as characters vanish and reappear behind one another, counter each other’s counter moves, and fire off devastating blasts that leave the area a wasteland. When even the early story battles have that much mayhem in them, you’d better be ready for everything your opponents can throw at you right from the very first battle. Bandai Namco will throw some incredibly thrilling fights at you in this latest Dragon Ball game, but you’d best believe you need to be trained and ready before you start fighting against these ultra powerful characters.
I cannot stress this enough: if you have not played the Dragon Ball Z: Budokai and Budokai Tenkaichi arena fighter games, you need to head over to the Super Training menu and go over everything in Battle Training. I figured since I have a decent handle on fighting games I could give the commands a glance and hop right into playing the game. I was utterly wrong and got stomped immediately. I thought the game would at least let me learn the ropes by lowering the difficulty, but by the time I hit Vegeta in Episode Battle (the story mode), I was getting mauled constantly. I even turned on every possible Battle Assist, getting the game to help with combos, Dragon Dashes to catch up with hurled foes, and help with blocking, and it made next to no difference. You can’t just lower the difficulty and mash buttons, here. You need to learn the systems.
Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero’s systems are very satisfying and help you fall in love with game once you commit to learning them. Battle Training will walk you through each of your moves one by one, letting you practice them until you master them. Since there’s a lot to factor into every second of combat, you should take your time, here. For instance, basic movement involves far more than just walking around, as you can leap into the air and fly at will. You can also Dragon Dash to move far faster, allowing you to chase foes you’ve launched away from you or to make a quick getaway if you need to get to some cover to avoid an incoming blast.
This leads us to your Ki, the meter that fuels many of your handy abilities. Dragon Dash costs Ki to use (the yellow bar under your health bar), and while it recharges as you smack your foe around (or if you stand still and hold R2, which charges it fast but practically begs to get you smacked), you can burn through it fast if you Dragon Dash too much. Same if you use Ki Blasts to pepper foes with a few bursts of energy or if you hold the button down to launch a single, devastating one. You’ll also burn through Ki in a hurry if you use your character-specific specials (like Gohan’s Explosive Cannon). While managing a special meter in a fighting game isn’t unique, since it’s connected to movement and being able to use many of your best moves, it feels even more stressful to keep track of it in this game.
So, it’s got more in-depth moves and the special meter is tied into combat a bit deeper. Why would I be worried about getting trashed playing Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero? On top of this, there are in-depth dodge, clash, and counters system in play. If you’re about to get slammed up close, you can Vanish Assault to appear behind your enemy, trying to get the drop on them. You can also just hold Circle and use Perception to counter your opponent’s strikes. You can do a high speed evasion by blocking with perfect timing when you’re about to get hit, slipping away to hit back. Your throws, fast steps, and Ultimate Blasts can enter a clash state against your opponent, resulting in a short quicktime event where you’re suddenly mashing buttons to come out on top. You have lots of tools to quickly turn a bout around, but things can just as easily get turned around on you.
This all results in battles that are extremely chaotic if you don’t have all of these moves, skills, and combat possibilities firmly in your mind. Right from the start, and even at low difficulties, you and your opponent will be vanishing and reappearing around one another, entering sudden clash states where you have to switch what you’re doing, and alternating between chasing and hurtling away from one another. It all happens blazingly fast, too. The game gives you a fair amount of health to make it so the matches don’t end too quickly even while you’re getting the hang of this stuff, but it can still be a lot to learn and get the hang of.
But when you start to get it, Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero looks and feels incredible. While I would argue that Dragon Ball FighterZ looks a little bit sharper when it comes to its characters and attacks, it doesn’t capture the feeling of movement and massive destruction that this game does. You will both be flying all over these massive battlefields, shifting from high-speed flight to an intimate beatdown where you’re doing dodges and counters against one another in the space of milliseconds. It captures this incredible spectacle because of all of these systems working in tandem – especially so as your attacks blow up the battlefield itself. If you slowed the game down to look at its visuals they don’t look as good as FighterZ, but when everything’s moving, it looks great. It’s relentlessly cool to look at these fights, and feels even better that you’re the one in charge of what happens.
Episode Battle is a good place to start practicing these skills; just don’t expect it to go easy on you. This story mode follows the narrative arcs of some of the major characters, capturing several major battles they went through. It manages to hit highlights from the various plotlines quickly and effectively without boring you with long plot dumps between fights, hitting a rare good middle ground for story that I didn’t see in Jujutsu Kaisen Cursed Clash or Naruto X Boruto Ultimate Ninja Storm Connections. The game gets to the point while still conveying the story and looking good while doing it, making Episode Battle pleasant to fight through. You can also bounce around several character arcs at will, so if you get stuck on a fight, you can switch characters and do someone else for a bit.
If you want something else that’s not in any previous Dragon Ball Z storyline, Bonus Battles offers some unique fights between characters in Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero. Maybe it’s just a hard battle where you are especially weak or it has some unique restrictions, but these offer special fights to test your abilities or just try out a battle between characters that would be different from the regular storyline. These add some extra fun for single player, but you can also design your own Bonus Battle for you or other players to work through.
Custom Battles sees you choosing who will fight and where they’ll fight. On top of this, you can set battle conditions for the fight. For these, you set a trigger condition (someone gets defeated, for example, or hits a certain level of health left), and then something will happen (they get transformed, lose access to certain moves, enemies will get harder, etc). You can also set up a story scene before, during, and after the fight, choosing effects, captions, announcer voices – basically creating your own cutscene (with some limitations). You can really do a lot with this – far more than I expected.
You can also post these Custom Battles online for others to play through, too. You can’t just create some miserable beatdown, though, as, like Mario Maker, you need to win the fight to be able to post it online. That said, players who want to set up creative challenges or to dabble with making their own limited Dragon Ball Z stories can do some neat things with this tool. It’s time-consuming, but is an incredibly neat extra for the game to have.
If you find yourself having trouble with some of the fights in Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero or are getting frustrated that you’re not progressing, there are Ability Items you can buy in the game’s shop that can improve your character’s powers when equipped. I didn’t find these broke the game – more like they gave you a bit of an edge in a fight. Plus, you can only equip so many on your character. Still, they make a difference and are fairly affordable as the game gives you Zeni constantly for every little thing you do in it. Even if you lose, simply playing as characters and doing things in a fight gives you Zeni, so you’re always getting a little something from playing it.
After being unimpressed with Jujutsu Kaisen Cursed Clash and Naruto X Boruto Ultimate Ninja Storm Connections, I was pleasantly surprised with Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero. It looks spectacular in motion and really captures the scope of the franchise’s wild fights. With its many counters, fast movements, explosive field effects, and incredible blast moves, it makes you feel like you’re fighting for your life against relentless enemies. It will take some real training to get all of its battle expectations down, but it is absolutely worth it.
Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero will be available on the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and PC on October 11, 2024.
DRAGON BALL: Sparking! ZERO takes the legendary gameplay of the Budokai Tenkaichi series and raises it to whole new levels. Make yours the destructive power of the strongest fighters ever to appear in DRAGON BALL! PS5 version reviewed. Review copy provided by company for testing purposes.
Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero capture's the anime's intensity with its many counters, fast movements, and impressive character attacks.
- Movement, basic attacks, counters upon counters, and the powerful blasts meld together into a chaotic blend that really captures the feeling of watching the anime.
- Even though it's challenging to learn, there are a decent number of unlocks and rewards you get whether you win or lose, ensuring you typically feel like you're making progress even when you're getting stomped.
- Blasting someone through an entire mountain is always pretty satisfying.
Published: Oct 7, 2024 10:05 am