Introduction: DRAGON BALL: Sparking! ZERO
DRAGON BALL: Sparking! ZERO is the newest game under the Dragon Ball franchise. According to its website, it “takes the legendary gameplay of the Budokai Tenkaichi series and raises it to whole new levels.” As someone whose only exposure to the whole series was Dragon Ball FighterZ, this means that I have no idea how this is gonna play out.
This is Sparking ZERO from someone seeing this game with fresh eyes.
After opening your game and setting your preferences, it sends you to the tutorial set in a training battle between Goku and Vegeta. The controls are fairly simple, and deceivingly so. This opening tutorial was quick and straight to the point, which teaches you enough to fight. Later on, you’ll find out that this is just level one out of the multiple layers this game has.
Once cleared, you go through the epic opening movie and the title card. After that is entirely up to you. You can go straight to ranked or you could enjoy all the offline content this game has to offer. It was interesting to see all these places and people through every menu option. The world is colorful and full of life. A drawback for this though is that the menu lags a bit since it has animation on every move you make.
Of course, I wanted to try out battling with friends so I headed straight to battle. We first tried out the local multiplayer option. I found the layout a little weird. Instead of getting to pick your team at the same time, you have to create your lineup one after the other which took some time considering you could build up to a team of 5 members. Another disappointing thing was that there was only one map available for local multiplayer which was the Hyperbolic Time Chamber. It’s the map that was the emptiest compared to the other cooler locations.
Gameplay-wise, it was pretty fun. It was a split screen so seeing where your opponent is was a little janky at times, but it wasn’t too bad. Playing these games was how we found out how much more mechanics there were than just managing your Ki. There’s the skill points system, points needed to have a fighting chance at these battles such as more moves, countering, and transforming/fusing. There’s also an additional mechanic when you use your ultimate moves against each other. It was a sight to see every time something happens on screen with how visually pleasing the effects are. Mashing one key and charging Ki gets you far, but not to the top.
Just like in any other game, if you want to get to the top, you gotta hit the lab. Training mode is essentially an extensive list of drills that guides you through every option you can have during battle. There was much more that you could do than just rushing it down and performing Kamehamehas. Despite the simple setup and movelist, it’s actually difficult to land timings in this game, especially the counters. As a new player, it was frustrating, but for my friends, it was a welcome challenge. I’ve already made peace with the fact that I might not be picking this up as quickly as I wanted. This led me to explore more of the offline content.
Encyclopedia
By accident, I went into the Encyclopedia. I didn’t think much of it at first. I thought it was just a database of all the characters and their movelist and possible transformations. To my surprise, it hosted what is probably my favorite feature. As mentioned, I don’t have any experience with the series. My only exposure to Dragon Ball mostly stems from internet culture such as memes and clips as this wasn’t a show I grew up watching. So when I saw a button that said girl talk, I pressed it. And boy do these girls talk!
The girls in question are Chi-chi, Bulma, and Videl. In an audio call format on the right side of the screen, they talk about the character you select. From the lines they say, you could draw how certain characters related to each other and sometimes they dropped bits of lore, but nothing that could overwhelm the player. It feels like a call with your girlfriends just gossiping.
Chi-chi rants about Goku’s Super Saiyan modes, Bulma gushes over Vegeta, and Videl is usually the one who provides more objective information about the character. The sheer amount of lines and unique conversations the girls have is impressive, granted they do keep things simple when characters get repetitive (I’m talking about you, 19th Goku).
Episode Battles
For a more in-depth look into the story, that’s where the Episode Battles come in. You play out the main story for the character selected. While some people might find this part bothersome, especially with the main story being something that they already know, the developers knew to spice it up a little by having what-if scenarios. Some of these presented themselves through making conscious choices, but sometimes some scenarios are achieved by how you cleared a certain stage or battle condition. It is fun, but at times it did feel like a storytime slideshow. For what-if scenarios, you’ll know you get them when it says Sparking Episode on the bottom.
Additionally, they also added a “switch camera” feature, which I also just noticed on the bottom of the screen and just went with it. I thought that it was simply a change of view from the main angle, but apparently, it’s from the lens of the character you’re playing as. It’s a fun little addition seeing exactly how the character sees. Sometimes, it adds to the story, but sometimes it’s better to trust the storytelling experts and view it from the angle they set it on.
And if the what-if scenarios weren’t enough, there are custom battles!
Custom Battle
Custom battles are where your made-up scenarios can come to life! Many people have experimented with this, but I feel like these people are really grinding through the feature here since it doesn’t have the friendliest user interface. The tutorial runs you down for a simple edit, but I found it confusing. The normal edit is more intuitive and gives you more things to play around with. And while there is a lot of customization available here, it still feels limiting. Things such as dialogue have a thousand options, but sometimes feel generic since you can’t create your self-made dialogue or type out what you want these characters to say.
I understand that if you give too much freedom to the players, but sometimes the conversation just won’t flow naturally with just the available options. It’s hard to sort out through it all with the lack of a search bar. Character quotes alone go up to 4625 available options. While you can limit it by adding more filters, there will be times when you won’t be able to get what you’re looking for.
Event tables, the function to make effects trigger such as a transformation or regaining health, was another thing to deal with. It’s a cool feature to have and while I understand that it’s not a main feature in terms of gameplay, I wish they could improve upon it more so that it feels more intuitive.
Fun Localization
Speaking of dialogue, it’s fun to see lines that reference modern social language. While some people have mixed opinions on it since they feel that it takes them out of the world Dragon Ball is set in, I find it hilarious and fun! It also makes sense that younger characters say stuff like “no cap” and call Andriod 18 a “baddie” since this is the type of language they would use if they lived among us.
It’s wacky, but as I’ve realized playing through this game, I think it’s meant to be that way. I have to salute the localization team on this as well as the writers themselves for considering making this number of unique dialogue for this game: from the encyclopedia, pre-round lines, win and loss lines, and even character selection!
Online Battle
Even if you say that the game is pretty unserious, there’s a lot of care taken into this game. Online battles are pretty smooth. Even when I tried playing on wifi, it was playable. Versing against wifi players was playable. They even take action to punish pluggers appropriately. I also appreciate that you could go into ranked completely blind as soon as you go into the game. When we tried the local multiplayer, we got to pick any character for fun, but for ranked games, there are certain rules in place.
Each character has a certain value called destruction points (DP) and you must build your roster within a certain amount. In this case, it’s 15 points with characters ranging from 1-10 on the DP scale. Since Dragon Ball has characters that have insane power levels, this is the game’s way to balance out teams.
As someone new to the series, this was a cool idea for me. It’s not necessarily the first time I’ve seen something like this, but I find that it made the most sense for Dragon Ball. You’re not taking away the fact that these characters are out-of-the-world strong (perhaps the strongest fighters ever to exist in the genre) and forcing to make all 182 characters and their variants equal because they simply aren’t.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I find that this game has a lot to offer. It caters to a lot of people and I can see why this had such a positive response from the community. As said in the intro, this is a review that is not blinded by nostalgia. Dragon Ball FighterZ didn’t really do much for me when I tried it out so I’m pleasantly surprised at how much I liked this game.
As a casual gamer, I went into rank and got absolutely wrecked, but would gladly do it again. It has its hiccups and there are some quality-of-life stuff that I wish they would update in the future, but it has its core gameplay down and some extra stuff on the side for those who aren’t sweating in ranked.
DRAGON BALL: Sparking! ZERO is available now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Series S, and Steam.
Official Publisher Game Page – Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO Bandai Namco Portal
2 Comments
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