Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO review

As someone who grew up adoring Dragon Ball Z, I was more than happy to gorge on any and all games featuring my favourite Super Saiyans and their friends. This meant playing all sorts of weird and wonderful titles, from GBA brawlers to poorly translated turn based RPGs. The one that stole my life the most though was Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaichi 2. This ridiculously named title was a bizarre over the shoulder fighting game full of all the punching and massive energy attacks you could ever want, and I played it to death. Other Dragon Ball games have come and gone, but I’ll never forget the hundreds of hours I spent beating up my bestie as The Ginyu Force in Tenkaichi 2. Well now there’s a new Dragon Ball game in town following in the footsteps of my beloved, and Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO is sure delight fans of the anime.

Upon starting Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO you’ll be greeted by a tutorial which you will need to pay extra close attention to. There is a lot to learn in order to even remotely understand (let alone be good at) this complex and unorthodox fighting game. Even something like moving has about five different inputs, involving using the control stick, shoulder buttons to ascend and descend in flight and ways to boost and teleport if you have enough energy. It’ll take a long time for you to be ready to unleash all your skills on an enemy in an actual fight, so get ready to study your ass off.

Moving is one thing, but beating up an actual enemy is another. Like any fighting game there are a variety of combos you can use on your opponent, which will combine punches, kicks and blasts to whittle down their health bar and possibly knock them flying. With plenty of ways to block, counter and dodge though you’ll need to be wary of your advances being quashed. Button mashing will only get you so far even against lower difficulty AI, but once you’ve got a few special attacks under your belt you’ll start chewing through baddies in no time.

As you would expect from a Dragon Ball game, Sparking! ZERO has a whole lot of stupidly over the top special attacks that you’ll recognise from the show. When you’ve got enough energy you can fire off one of these by holding a shoulder button and face button together, and will then start charging a massive Kamehameha or rushing in for essentially a cutscene combo. Super attacks require you to charge your energy to maximum levels and will almost always knock out multiple health bars and trigger about thirty seconds of ridiculous flashing lights and one liners.

All of these attacks are incredibly satisfying to use, but to so you’ll have to charge up your energy. This means standing still and shouting as a powerful and familiar aura shines around you, which as I’m sure you can imagine isn’t particularly easy in a frantic fighting game. As both players will want to use them though there will be these standoff moments where both players are just charging their energy and staring at each other, which always feels uneasy.

There are plenty of ways to play Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO, from a story mode that covers pretty much every aspect of the show from inception to modern day to online battling. Starting with the campaign is probably the most sensible though, and provides a lovely nostalgia trip as it always does in Dragon Ball games. There are a variety of campaigns you can play featuring different characters, starting obviously with Goku but as you progress you’ll unlock campaigns for Vegeta, Piccolo, Gohan and even villains like Frieza to name but a few. What’s really cool about this mode though is that there are alternate story paths you can unlock by fulfilling specific conditions, which lead to some really interesting developments and are a fun challenge.

When you’re feeling ready to take on some other players online (you poor fool) there are plenty of modes you can choose from. The standard quick battles and ranked battles can be selected, as well as joining or even setting up various tournaments. All sorts of fun rules can be added to tournaments like banning flying or only allowing characters from a certain arc of the anime, and it’s always a blast to see which bizarre side character overcomes the odds against the strongest being in the galaxy. You can play these tournaments with bots too, which I spent hours doing with glee like the Dragon Ball nerd I am.

There are so many things to do I haven’t even mentioned in Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO. Things like spending money at the shop to customise characters with various upgrades and outfits, or collecting the Dragon Balls and making a wish to Shenron for more characters or cash. It’s honestly a little overwhelming at first, but before you know it you’ll be inching ever closer to having all 182 characters at your disposal.

There’s a whole lot to love about Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO, but one aspect of the game that needs a special mention is the visuals. The vibrant anime style of the series is captured perfectly here, and it means all the big flashy attacks are even more of a spectacle. Alongside this there are wonderful little touches like characters having their outfits damaged in battle and changing their appearance as you fight, which is ridiculously cool. The audio is as good as the visuals too, with the option to play with Japanese or English voice acting depending on your preference.

Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO is a wonderful fighting game, but it does have a few issues. The biggest of these is the gargantuan learning curve, which the game does not help ease you along. The opening tutorial is beyond inadequate, and only by making your way to the training mode and completing hours of lessons will you be even close to ready to actually play the game. I played around half of these at first as I was itching to jump in to the game, and there were so many basic abilities like tagging in teammates and transforming that I simply didn’t know how to do. A concerted effort to make a long and compelling tutorial would have made this game infinitely more enjoyable, and it’s a shame that instead you just have to study on your own for hours.

The other issue with Sparking! ZERO that will irritate some is how long some of the more impactful moves take to complete. If your opponent is good, they’ll often use these regularly enough that you’ll spend more time watching cutscenes than actually fighting.

Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO is a wonderful fighting game that’s unlike anything else on the market, but you’ll need to be willing to put a lot of time into learning how to play it. When you do though you’ll be greeted with flashy combat, an in depth campaign and loads of other delightful game modes to play alone or with friends. It may take some dedication to get to that point, but nobody said becoming a Super Saiyan would be easy.