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The Dragon Ball Z: Budokai franchise is important to me. As someone whose anime knowledge was limited to the Pokémon series in the late ’90s, Budokai opened my eyes to perhaps the world’s biggest and most beloved anime. Sure, I had seen clips of Dragon Ball Z and knew the names Goku and Vegeta, but I didn’t have the necessary context to understand why it was important and popular.
My playthrough of the first Budokai game in 2002 was a revelation, exposing me to the first three arcs of the anime and introducing me to the stories of iconic characters like Raditz, Frieza, and Cell. I would go on to continue my education through Budokai 2 but fell off shortly after that. However, it was the push I needed to finally sit down and watch the first several arcs of the anime.
Sadly, I didn’t continue watching long enough to get caught up and I haven’t kept up with the Dragon Ball games, outside of some FighterZ tourism. That means I missed the entire Budokai Tenkaichi series (or as it’s known in Japan, Sparking!). That’s why, when Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero was announced, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it. Thankfully, I had that opportunity during Summer Game Fest Play Days in June, and again at a small preview event in San Diego, California.
In my first Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero gameplay session back in June, I was astounded by how well the bombast of the anime’s fights translates to the fights in the game. That sentiment doubled down during my most recent time playing. Whether you’re Goku throwing Vegeta into the water of Planet Namek and continuing the fight beneath the waves, Trunks smashing Beerus through boulders in the Tournament of Power Arena, or Gohan taking on the giant Hirudegarn (whose size is faithfully represented in-game) in the middle of a city, it’s safe to say that chaos reigns supreme in Sparking Zero.
As you duke it out on the ground, in the sky, and even beneath the sea, you can throw melee attacks, perform Ki Blasts, and build up your meter to perform various character-specific abilities. If you charge your Ki Gauge long enough, you can pull off special attacks, and if you can manage to charge it even longer, you enter Sparking Mode; the weather and music change, your moves improve, and you can pull off your character’s most powerful attacks.
During this preview, I dove into the various game modes. The first gameplay segment was devoted to single-player team battles, Tutorials, Custom Battles, and Bonus Battles. Even though this portion consisted of two hours, it was not nearly enough time to fully experience how much is on offer with this game. The tutorials were effective at helping me improve my counters and develop more advanced strategies, and I had a blast with the standard battles, which can get quite drawn out if you fill out each five-character team. I loved setting up tournaments with deep, specialized rulesets, but I most enjoyed the Custom Battles and Bonus Battles, which allow for not only awesome what-if battles–complete with custom cutscenes created by the developers–but also in-depth scenario creation.
The developers behind Sparking Zero want to deliver a full battle customization suite but understand that it can be quite a daunting task if you have all the tools at your disposal, even with the extended tutorial that welcomes you to the mode. To help with that, Sparking Zero includes a Simple mode where you only customize the characters, battle environment, title card, and thumbnail, but if you’re anything like me, you’re going to want to go into the fine details through Normal mode, where you can set up cutscenes with templated dialogue options, poses, and special mid-battle events that can trigger effects like buffs or character transformations. You can also dictate various win conditions.
“You can really go in and customize tons of things,” producer Jun Furutani tells GameSpot. “It could be as simple as, ‘I want to fight this guy,’ and that could be the Custom Battle. But on the other side of the spectrum, you could really go into depth about what happens in the battle, what happens before and post-battle–a lot of different things.”
Players can upload their creations and download the works of others to see what folks across the globe have cooked up, and edit others’ creations if there are parts you think could be better. The depth and ambition of this mode feels like it could be a Dragon Ball fan’s dream come true once the broader community gets its hands on it.
To call Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero an ambitious title would be an understatement, and it all starts with the character-select screen, which takes an absurd amount of time to scroll through. My biggest point of reference to this point, the Budokai franchise, maxed out at just over 40 characters in one game, but Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero delivers 181 characters in the base game. An additional preorder character brings that roster up to 182 playable characters, and that’s still all before any potential post-launch additions.
That number surpasses even the massive Budokai Tenkaichi 3 roster, which featured more than 150 characters. “Since Budokai Tenkaichi 3: Sparking Meteor, it’s been a long time, and there was a huge roster for that,” Furutani says. “Since it has been such a long time, we couldn’t really reuse those assets that we had in the past, so we had to kind of start from scratch. Adding all these characters has been very difficult, but I think the Budokai Tenkaichi series is all about being able to enjoy the Dragon Ball world through the eyes of the different characters, so we wanted to go above and beyond what Budokai Tenkaichi 3 did, which is why we decided to go with this roster size. We want people to enjoy the newest and best version of the series.”
With this being the first game in the Sparking series in nearly two decades (unless you count Tenkaichi Tag Team on PSP; then it’s only been 14 years), it makes sense to play a bit of catch-up. The roster pulls from Dragon Ball Z, Dragon Ball GT, Dragon Ball Super, and various movies. Upon booting up Sparking Zero for the first time, players can choose from 100 characters, with the rest of the roster unlockable through completing stages in Episode Battles or certain Custom Battles. Meanwhile, others can be purchased using Zeni, the in-world currency that you earn through playing.
Balancing such a massive collection of fighters would prove to be a nightmare. Thankfully, while other fighting games need to worry about balancing the roster to ensure relative competitiveness regardless of which character the players choose, Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero instead opts to give players an experience more loyal to the source material.
“We wanted to focus on keeping things as canon as possible,” Fututani says. “So, a weak character will remain weak, and if you were to choose that character, you would have a challenge, just as they would have a challenge if it were on the original content. And so, contrary to a game like Dragon Ball FighterZ–tons of characters in that game as well, but it’s very balanced; there’s not an OP character, per se–in this game, if you were to use Mr. Satan and you were fighting against Vegeta, you would have a very hard time, which would be canonically accurate. I think we focus more on being able to enjoy the world of Dragon Ball as it was meant to be enjoyed by the character you choose.”
Despite this fundamental difference between FighterZ and Sparking Zero, the developers behind Sparking Zero still learned lessons from FighterZ and its fan base. “We noticed that there are hardcore players that play PvP and are very into the esports scene, but some people just want to enjoy this story,” Furutani says. “I’m pretty sure there are users that only do Episode Battle, or only do Custom Battle, or only play online. So, with that in mind, for unlocking characters in the game, even if you were to just do one of these things over and over and over again, you’ll be able to unlock characters, so you don’t have to jump to a different mode that you’re not comfortable with in order to unlock your characters.”
I wrapped up my latest play time in Sparking Zero right where my fandom of Dragon Ball started in the first place: the story-driven Episode Battle. This time, the narrative of the various arcs is told through the eyes of eight different characters, including Goku, Vegeta, Gohan, Piccolo, Frieza, and Future Trunks. Here, you play through pivotal battles in the various arcs represented in the game, stretching from Dragon Ball Z to fights in Dragon Ball Super. As you might imagine, Goku’s Episode Battle story mode is the longest.
That is precisely what I got my hands on: I played through the beginning of Goku’s story, which starts with his iconic battle against Raditz. After the initial fistfight, I’m given the choice to team up with Piccolo to take Raditz down or go it alone; at various junctures in Episode Battle, you can make choices that affect how the battles play out. I love the ability to alter the timeline and see how certain events would play out under different circumstances. At Summer Game Fest, I watched the demo team go it alone, which made the fight much more difficult, so this time, I opted to play it the way the story happened in the source material.
Due to how important it was to Goku’s story, the Raditz fights were no-brainers for the development team when it came to selecting which battles to include. According to Furutani, the team let the impact on the storyline be a guiding light for inclusion. “We chose the very critical story points for each of the characters,” Furutani says. “We wanted players to enjoy what Dragon Ball feels like through their lenses. That’s how we chose which story points to focus on.”
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After working together with Piccolo to finish off Raditz, I’m dumped into the Vegeta saga, which, as far as my gameplay session is concerned, culminates with a fight against Great Ape Vegeta. This fight is pretty tough, and I lost against Great Ape Vegeta once (which results in a cutscene about how Vegeta takes over the world as a result), but on my final shot, I successfully took down the big monkey.
Though it’s likely I’ll spend the most time in Episode Battles so I can rediscover these beloved stories in a similar way to how I learned about them in the first place, I can’t help but be blown away by the number of modes and characters on offer. Whether you’ve been watching, reading, and playing Dragon Ball-related media for decades or you just have a loose familiarity with the main characters of the series, Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero feels like the ultimate love letter to the franchise from a series that was asleep for too long.
Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero arrives on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC on October 11.
