Growing up, I was likely one of many Aussie kids who spent their mornings before school watching Cheez TV and with that came many cartoons from Japan, like Sailor Moon, Pokémon and of course Dragon Ball Z. When I left school and started working in retail, one game we sold pretty consistently was Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi and now 17 years later the 4th entry in the series has arrived. Has the time between releases, along with the name realignment, sparked more interest in the series, or is it stuck at zero?

Before I dive into the review in full, I did just want to highlight that while the name seems different to the Budokai series, this is the fourth entry, the name Sparking Zero just aligns back to what the series was known as in Japan. This is exactly the same as the Yakuza games becoming Like A Dragon here, both series are just giving their western titles an adjustment back to their original Japanese releases. Ok, with that said and done, let’s talk about the game and boy howdy is there a lot of game here, from character specific stories to custom battles, tournaments – both online and off, and of course a gallery where you can discover a heap of details on who all the characters are. As it’s been a few years since I reviewed a Dragon Ball fighting game, it was Dragon Ball Xenoverse back in 2015, I was really curious to see what may have changed in the past decade.

The first thing I did was jump into training mode, because my skills in fighting games are not ideal at the best of times and after getting the basics down pat, I went for the story mode. Well I say the story mode, but in actuality it was the story of Goku, you unlock more as you encounter them. Upon selecting Goku’s story, what I got was a very abridged version of the Dragon Ball Z saga, where Goku was the main character. Most of the time it matches up with the anime, but there are times when Goku is locked off in training or such and other characters take the lead. In this instance, when that happens the game just skips to the next event that Goku was involved in and it feels wrong. You can play through the Vegeta story or the Trunks story and doing that will give you a sense of the complete picture, but you can’t do it in sequence. If you are in the Buu saga for Goku and want to see what fights Vegeta was up to in that, you have to go and start the Vegeta story and then catch up to that point. It honestly gives me a lot of vibes from comics, where they will tell you to read another comic, in order to get the full story of what is going on. This is unlikely to be of any sort of concern to anyone who knows the saga’s story, but for those who are coming in new, or need a refresh it is not the best approach.

Thankfully the gameplay is great, but beyond that it is approachable. Almost all of the attacks are done by hitting one button, so there is no Tekken level combo’s to learn, but if you have enough Ki, you can unleash more powerful attacks. Both you and your opponent rely on Ki in order to do a number of moves and while you can earn it when you land melee attacks, you can also supercharge it by pulling a trigger in. Some attacks will home in on your opponent and are worth doing, others will have you speed across the map to punch them, if you land the hit it then triggers a massive sequence of attacks, but they can dodge. I quickly found out that dodging it just as crucial as attacking here, as a well timed dodge can get you out of range of a massive attack. The opponent you are facing can do the same thing as yourself, so they can charge up their Ki, throw off massive attacks and dodge yours, so there is a lot of back and forth. Battles can change on a dime though, as your skill counter can unlock transformations, fuse options and even enable the Sparking mode. It was always fun to trigger a Super Saiyan transformation, no matter the level I went it.

I found that in the story mode, there were some battles where the opponent would often spam their special attacks a lot more frequently than anything else and they often landed on me. Because I was struggling in a fight, looking at you Black Goku, I realised I needed some more training, so I left the story and went into the Custom Battle screen, which is exactly like what you imagine it would be. There are a few ways to create a custom fight and if you want the very basics you can do that, but I opted for what they call Normal, which technically should be called advanced, but I digress. The Normal mode gives you control over pretty much every aspect of the match, from the characters to the location, music, events and even the battle conditions. That last one is especially fun to mess with, as instead of just winning a fight, you can set it to see how long you can last. The simple mode gives you a list of battle types and then a few options and the final mode copy, lets you copy an existing setup that you can then tweak. What all this means is that you can create your own story based fights, from the opening title card to the music and even conditions that if your character falls, someone will rush in to save them.

It is important to note that custom battle is different from battle, the latter is a more traditional mode. Here you pick a character or characters if you want a team fight, location and then go for it. If you want more than just a single match at a time, you can also sign up for or create your own tournament. They offer up a plethora of options and some will be familiar to Dragon Ball fans. I thought they would be single fights but they were more in depth than I expected, but it was worth doing if only because the first time I unleashed a Spirit Bomb, everyone ran out of the stadium. There are also challenges you can work towards, some of them are going to be very basic like play as a certain character 10 times, but some will require 100 plays as a character or 50 wins in a row. Those and the stamps from Whis will sometimes earn you Dragon Balls, which will let you summon Shenron, Porunga or Super Sheron, which can reward you with items, zeni and even extra content. Before I forget there is a shop where you can buy more characters, unlock new looks for existing ones, new voice lines, emotes and player card options, not to mention items to help in battle. There is just a lot of game here and that is before you take it online. Sadly the online matches for me were hard to come by, a by product of the review period, but I did manage to play a few matches and I lost most of them, but that was due to my skill. The game didn’t have any issues online, even when the screen was filled with effects.

That makes a good segue into talking about the games presentation, because it does look amazing, but there are a few downsides. First though the good, the game looks great and it runs near flawlessly and when the game gets busy, it still runs great. Now I will say this, the game looks almost identical to every other Dragon Ball game that has been made, because the characters and the world are the same. Where this one shines is that the game no longer sports a grainy look in an attempt to replicate the hand drawn look of the tv series, but those expecting something all-new, will be let down. As the developers have spent years now refining the 3d anime look, there really isn’t much to say about the characters, they look great and are animated in such a way that they feel exactly as you might expect. Where things fell apart for me though was with a few aspects, starting with the worlds that you fight in, they are large but barren. I know that they have lines in story mode that explain why there are no folks around, but there is also no wildlife or really any sense that anything lives in the locations.

That is a minor issue to be sure, just like the games effects and by that I mean explosions, smoke and all that. There are times when you or your opponent will launch insanely large attacks and when they land, the effects kick into gear and it can be near impossible to see what is going on. They do put a very light silhouette of your opponent, so you can at least try to see where they are, but its not always the easiest thing to spot. Another issue is with the speed, I know I said just how great the game runs before, but there are times when you and your opponent will spend quite a bit of time Z-Countering, that is moving behind your opponent and the game zaps the camera around with such speed, that after 4 in a row it just gets to much. The camera also has issues where if your character is on the ground, as the game locks onto your opponent, if they are above you then the camera goes into the ground and you see the nothing beneath it. Now all combined, those issues are annoying, but they don’t impact the actual enjoyment of the game, they just exist. Perhaps the most annoying aspect of the presentation though is with just how inconsistent it can be in the story mode, there are times when you get cutscenes with movement and speech, sometimes it is static and speech and sometimes just postcard looking stills.

Moving onto the games audio, there is a lot to enjoy there, first up is the voice acting. Now the game loads by default into the Japanese voice acting and I am sure that is great if you know it, as I grew up on the English I had to change it. All the characters that I knew from my time watching the show sound great and the unknown sound fine as well, but they do have an issue. There are times when they repeat their lines a lot, each time Vegeta launched an attack in the story mode, it was the same line. It isn’t just during gameplay, in the shop the number of times I heard Bulma say the same thing about not being taken shopping, was a lot and worse, sometimes it repeated back to back. Something I did enjoy was that in the gallery for characters, you can view their stats, transformation options and learn about them, but for every character Chi-chi, Bulma and Videl all have a little conversation about them, and it is just delightful. So the voice acting is great, I just wish there was more of it. As for the music, it sounds great and being able to pick music for each character and especially in custom battles, really makes a difference, but I don’t think there is one single track that you are going to want to play on repeat.

Dragon Ball Sparking! Zero is a pretty incredible game, and there is a lot of game contained within. The story mode featuring the best of moments of selected characters is good, but as each one focuses on a single character, the story jumps around a lot and unless you know it, you will get lost. The other modes offer a pretty robust offering, both online and off. Plus if you don’t like what is on offer, you can almost every aspect of the game. The game is not flawless as there are a number of issues with the presentation, but they never really get in the way of having a good time. Fans of the series will enjoy what is on offer and those coming back in for the first time in a while or at all, will find a lot to like about it, so if this is zero, I can’t imagine where they take the series next.