god i fucking love dragon ball

It was only a few weeks ago where I barely decided to buy Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero on a whim, so I could easily play with my friends. Almost immediately I was hooked, even without ever watching a single minute of Dragon Ball. (i have since started watching dbz)

Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero

Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero is a fantastic revival of the Budokai Tenkaichi series of DBZ games. It may not share it's US title, but it's for all intensive purposes Dragon Ball: Budokai Tenkaichi 4.

It's packed to the brim with content, with a fun, albeit a bit compromised "Episode Battle" story mode offering about 18-20 hours worth of gameplay. A custom mini-campaign battle builder called "Custom Battle" with premade bonus battles alongside community created bonus battles with much increased difficulty for endgame players (and those that want to push themselves). It has a full fledged online and offline modes with DP and single character battles, a Tournament mode with configure settings and presets based on in-lore tournaments alongside supporting split-screen battles.

It's visually stunning and perfectly captures the art-style of the anime's, I could talk about it's technical details or I could just play the opening cinematic. I am lazy.

There are some technical issues, this game was clearly rushed to some extent. The UI is a bit of a mess sometimes and the game has frame rate issues on series S. They had to limit splitscreen duels to only one, basic map because of the performance issues they were having with two players.

The slideshow cutscenes in episode battle are betting than having nothing, but for a game of this caliber it's a bit sad to not have full cutscenes. For example, when Vegeta blows himself up in his fight with Majin Buu, the episode battle uses a shitty slideshow cutscene instead of the already existing animation used in Majin Buu Vegeta's ultimate. It skips a LOT of major story areas, for some reason skipping the entirety of the Universe 7 vs 6 arc.

There isn't many stages, missing some iconic no-brainer areas like Kami's Lookout, Space, Planet Vegeta, Ice Mountains, Highway, U6 vs U7 arena, etc. However what stages we do have are beautiful and nicely intractable. (however world tournament is kinda ass cuz you have to watch this 5 minute long ahh animation every time you use a half-decent ult).

The customization is cool but we're missing some major outfits like Goku's Jacket outfit, Vegeta's "Bad Man" outfit, Krillin's Namek outfit, etc. For some reason though they got almost every Gohan outfit. They have 10 accessory slot but other than the Freeza scouters and halo rings, they're useless.

While sparking zero has some performance and networking issues, it's gameplay is so good it really doesn't matter. It's story is lacking, not in the actual story content (its ripped from DBZ and DBS so it's already gonna be good), but in it's presentation and quantity. Nonetheless, I am absolutely addicted.

I like to review games based on their merits in their own genre, alongside a general rating and a breakdown in a few major areas.

Tech: 8/10 (graphics, physics, backend)
Story: 6/10
Gameplay: 10/10
Bugs: 8/10 (higher is less)
Value: 10/10 (playtime, quality of time spent, amount of time spent)

Rating as a 3d Fighter: 9.5/10

Rating as a general game: 8/10

Final Rating: 9/10