As a seasoned Dragon Ball fan who’s been around since the days of black and white TV and cassette tapes, I can’t help but feel a bit nostalgic when I play Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero. The roster is as expansive as ever, with Goku, Vegeta, Gohan, Trunks, Frieza, Cell, and Buu filling up more slots than a Walmart on Black Friday. It’s like they’ve got a character factory churning out these guys!
17 years have passed since Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 3, with its 3D-arena combat, captivated console gamers, and ever since, fans yearned for a revival of that classic style. Now, Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero has responded to their demands, offering a fresh narrative due to the introduction of Dragon Ball Super – a series not considered part of the original Dragon Ball lore until 2013. While the Tenkaichi gameplay mechanics remain engaging thanks to its swift and exhilarating battle system, the game falls short with repetitive play styles and limited mode selections, leaving players craving more depth in this fight.
Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero follows the classic Tenkaichi style, where two combatants engage in intense battles within an expansive arena filled with buildings, rocks, cliffs, and other structures ripe for destruction. The characters possess a blend of physical and energy-based abilities, showcasing spectacular and explosive special moves such as the Kamehameha, Final Flash, Spirit Bomb, and other renowned Dragon Ball techniques.
It’s evident from the get-go that Sparking Zero boasts an exceptional visual style, seamlessly transitioning from the main menu to the heart of combat. Characters move and fight smoothly, and the brief cutscenes during a successful ultimate attack are enjoyable, adding to the excitement of executing these moves. Notably, attacks like Ultra Instinct Goku’s Sign form performing the Point-Blank Kamehameha – with animation directly lifted from the anime – are particularly impressive ways to conclude a match.
Navigating the battlefield and approaching fights can be thrilling at first, but soon enough, each encounter turns into a repetitive sequence of button presses. All characters in the game follow a similar control layout: A single button is used for close-range physical attacks, another for short energy blasts, while special moves require holding a shoulder button and pressing one of those two buttons. They can also dodge, dash, jump or fall back to the ground, and counter when attacked. If a character builds up their ki to maximum capacity and triggers Sparking, they gain access to an extremely powerful ultimate move.
In every contest, there’s a thrill akin to rapid-fire punches and kicks from an anime, as pressing the attack button intensifies that sensation. However, for those seeking intricate, strategic combat with advanced techniques, this game might not satisfy that need. Instead, most battles follow a predictable pattern: The fight starts, we launch a few attacks and push our adversary back, then we build up our energy reserve (ki meter) to repeat the sequence until the battle concludes.
There’s something thrilling about these types of battles – the moment when a Super Spirit Bomb is executed and the sequence unfolds never fails to be exhilarating. Plus, discovering various characters within Dragon Ball’s history is enjoyable and intriguing. However, it should be noted that the gameplay mechanics could use more depth, which might make it less appealing for extended gaming sessions. Yet, this isn’t a new issue for earlier Budokai Tenkaichi games, and hardcore fans have still found enjoyment in them. So, if you’re a series veteran, you might feel quite comfortable here.
In Sparking Zero, you’ll find this dynamic most clearly in the main single-player mode called Episode Battle. Here, you pick one of the franchise’s central figures and journey through the story as that character. You’ll engage in crucial battles that your chosen character encounters. Scenes separating each fight can vary from still images with dialogue to brief, fully animated sequences depicting conversations among characters.
The game features a repetitive pattern where after each enjoyable fight, it quickly becomes tedious due to limited variations in the cutscenes. This monotony is accentuated by unexpected difficulty surges scattered across the journey. While many of these challenges occur during pivotal moments in the Dragon Ball Z series against formidable adversaries like Goku’s foes, some of these hurdles are unreasonably challenging; even Great Ape Vegeta shouldn’t withstand a 10-hit combo without flinching and grab you before you can deliver hit number 11, instantly depleting one of Goku’s health bars. To add to the frustration, losing a battle triggers an unavoidable, non-skippable cutscene before allowing a reattempt, with repeated losses resulting in multiple viewings of the same cutscene and repetition of the same voice clips, which can get tiresome quickly.
Episode Battles introduce some diversity by incorporating decision-making moments or alternate win conditions that create different story outcomes. These interactive elements serve as an exciting twist on the recurring plot points often seen in Dragon Ball Z’s arcs, particularly those of Piccolo’s and Goku’s. In one such early choice, when Piccolo proposes teaming up against Raditz, you have the option to decline his offer and fight alone. If you choose this path, Krillin ends up joining Goku instead in a hypothetical situation.
These standalone events are intriguing, yet they lead us to only a few additional battles before resuming the usual course, making them mostly short-lived diversions rather than significant changes. Overall, Episode Battle effectively recaps the complex narrative of Dragon Ball, but aside from the Dragon Ball Super storylines, it revisits familiar territory and the branching paths don’t quite offer enough novelty to keep things fresh.
In the game Sparking Zero, a significant number of playable characters exceeds 100: specifically, there are 181 characters in total. However, much like other Dragon Ball fighting games, this number can appear larger due to duplicate characters. For instance, the main character Goku is represented by no less than 19 different versions within the roster. These versions encompass his “base forms” (normal, black-haired Goku), every transformation from Super Saiyan to Ultra Instinct, child versions from Dragon Ball GT and their respective transformations. This count of 19 doesn’t even account for alternate villainous Goku (Goku Black) and its transformations, nor the fusions between Goku and Vegeta and their transformations.
In the game, Goku isn’t the only one with multiple character representations, as Vegeta takes up 14 spots (excluding fusions and his GT villain form, Baby Vegeta), Gohan uses 11, and Trunks takes nine. Even the villains aren’t exempt from this strategy of adding unnecessary characters, with Frieza, Cell, and Buu each occupying at least five spots. During a match, some forms can even transform into other forms, making the large number of “unique” character slots appear more random.
Admittedly, it’s beneficial that the game offers various character forms, and each form isn’t a carbon copy of another. The combo sequences differ among forms, and the special moves activated by pressing R2 are unique for each form – they resemble Echo Fighters from Super Smash Bros., not entirely distinct characters. However, since every character uses the same control scheme, these unique moves seem less exceptional because the same buttons are used to activate them. The character roster seems somewhat excessive, and a quick glance at the select screen confirms this excess.
In this game, you’ll find a large number of characters capable of competing in both one-on-one duels and tournament brackets, whether played offline or online. However, our attempts to connect for an online match during the pre-launch period were limited to just one successful connection, despite multiple tries in various methods. The game functioned smoothly overall, with occasional minor glitches, but due to the lack of a full player base, these early experiences may not fully represent what you’ll encounter on the actual launch day. Your experience may vary upon release.
Custom Battles on Sparking Zero provide an opportunity to design your own unique battles with customized cutscenes playing before and after each fight. Using in-game editors, you can select scenes, backgrounds, character poses, and dialogue, then upload your scenarios to a server for others to try out. Essentially, it empowers you to produce mini-episodes of the anime with a dramatic focus on battles. However, there’s a significant constraint that impacts the individuality this mode aims to achieve in practice.
That issue is with the dialogue, as what you can “write” is not free text; instead, you have to choose between a list of pre-written phrases and choose which characters are saying them. Certain words highlighted in green within the pre-written phrases can also be switched for something else, but again your choices are assigned rather than freely written. The risks in giving free reign to write dialogue for these scenes are understood, but that lack of freedom completely hampers the entire idea. The lines provided are generic and limited, and they don’t generate a ton of excitement for the scene, leaving the mode feeling underwhelming.
Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero successfully upgrades the Budokai Tenkaichi style for today, but it carries over several issues from its earlier days such as limited control options, simple gameplay, and restricted mode choices. Despite the enjoyable core fighting experience and impressive visuals, monotony arises swiftly. The modes offer a chance to re-experience iconic Dragon Ball tales, but they can feel repetitive quite fast.
In Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero, there’s plenty of entertainment to find, yet the comeback doesn’t deliver the level of delight we anticipated.
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2024-10-08 03:09