Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero Review

I wasn't even planning to get this game anytime soon or not as soon as I did. I hated the Sand Land game so much that Sparking Zero came out around the same time I played that and I decided, "well let's play the better game based on a franchise by Akria Toriyama" so as a result, I bought Sparking Zero at full price rather than the discount I was originally going to get it on. With that all out of the way, how was it?

It's "good" but buying it for the single player and story mode at the current price point, I'm not so sure is a good idea, I know Sparking Zero's big appeal was the multiplayer but the story mode isn't really that great. I'd say it's a step down from the story modes in the very series Sparking Zero is trying to revive minus Tenkaichi 1. Before I get started on the story mode, I'll start talking about the gameplay.

This is very much a Tenkaichi game, of course it is, that's Sparking Zero's biggest draw, and as a guy who played those games a lot as a kid, and only replayed the 3rd game around 2 years ago, I felt right at home with everything, Sparking Zero is very much the modernized Tenkaichi game that many people wanted. You want a Tenkaichi game with a new look and covers the modern Dragon Ball content than look no furthur. No more need to mod Tenkaichi 3 anymore, I guess.

Even playing Sparking Zero, it's going to have it's detractors especially those that play more traditional fighting games, the game's mechanics have a lot more going for it than many other similar arena anime fighters. Naruto Storm for example can generally feel pretty mindless a lot of the time since the back and forth in Storm is basically landing the first hit and hoping you got the substitution jutsu meter lined up to break out of the combo string and maybe having an ultimate jutsu lined up.

Sparking Zero on the other hand gives you more, you got Z counters, high and low blocks, parries, sparking mode, charge attacks, dashes as well there being a distance game where you can use ki blasts and energy attacks to prevent your opponent from powering up or if you suck at close quarters combat like me, you can try to constantly play the distance game. There is beam struggles and clashes to account for to.

There are issues Sparking Zero has like Z counter timing and parrying for every character being the same and many of the attacks can be boiled down to energy beams and rushing melee attacks and a lot of the combos for the characters are just square, triangle, square, or square, square, triangle, but as far as this style of fighter is concerned, Dragon Ball Sparking Zero has more going it for it than many of it's contemporaries.

However the single player is where SZ drops the ball for me. By no means is it, "bad" and it does a decent enough job at being a bear minimum single player but at the same time, the "what ifs" don't amount to much since the story decisions pop up too few and far between.

Much of the character routes outside of Goku don't have much effort put into them. It's decently presented even if it could be of a higher standard since some scenes are still images with voices and other are full on cutscenes.

The biggest problem is the other characters' routes outside of Goku have large chunks of story missing for them. Vegeta has no Super content, Gohan has Sayain and Namek Sagas skipped over, Piccolo goes up to the Androids, Future Trunks only covers Goku Black, and the villain routes felt like they were tacked on. The whole thing feels like Dragon Universe from Budokai 3 and I'm not sure SZ does a good job capturing that since at least DU covers every major character's fight throughout the series. All the main fights with Jiren, Goku Black and Frieza are covered but it didn't seem they needed to be there since those characters popped in one saga and Frieza was gone for so long of DB until Super. It also doesn't even include the fact that all the routes have the Universe 6 saga skipped over. Doing anything past Goku's campaign felt like a chore.

Another major aspect of the story mode that isn't really that great is the difficulty, and no it's not the Great Ape Vegeta fight, it's the amount of times the story mode has the boss rush handicap matches and how canon ending requirements for some characters requires you to wait for dialogue before finishing off an enemy. The amount of the former can really annoy me since it's the only way SZ adds difficulty. You wil have a hard time fighting one opponent, then another character with lots of health appears, and you may have to fight 4-5 characters at once.

As a result, I mainly just played a distance game, spammed charged up energy attacks and special moves to win. It felt like I was just cheesing because I had to since the AI is relentless when it comes to close quarters fighting. It didn't feel like the game wanted me to play the "fun" way.

Overall, SZ is a good game, but if you aren't playing online, wait for a discount for the single player content.