Dragon Ball Sparking Zero first look: Your Wish is Granted

When thinking of anime games, you usually think of Bandai Namco’s numerous anime arena fighters with various qualities. They never could match up with the mid-late 2000s that they have built themselves upon, with many many fans trying to ask for that era to come back. Luckily Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero provides this with the same quality and much much more.

Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero is THE Anime arena fighting game we’ve all been waiting for.

Providing itself with 182 characters in the base roster at launch (183 if you get the preorder pack that includes Goku Mini from Dragon Ball Damia, the latest series out now), many different modes, including 3 levels of training that help get you to know who you want to play as from Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, Dragon Ball GT, Dragon Ball Super, the non-canon Dragon Ball movies, and in the future, Dragon Ball Damia, with many many more characters being added later on as paid DLC. Instead of using the DLC to lock legacy characters behind it, the upcoming DLCs will add sprinkles to this already-loaded game. Honestly, 70 dollars is way too generous of a price for a game of this quality, featuring every era of the late, great Akira Toriyama’s legendary story.

The story for this game is exactly what you expect and NOTHING you’d expect at the same time. You can go with how Toriyama wrote the story or you can branch off and do ‘what if’ scenarios that tell the story within different events, like a father-son galick gun instead of the father-son kamehameha in the Cell Saga. While there are difficulty spikes at some points in the story, like Great Ape Vegeta, it’s important to train your senses with the characters, not flail around and button mash.

The online combat is also glorious to behold despite the fact that this game does not have any rollback netcode nor the ability to play cross-platform with friends. But for the matches I did play with a few buddies of mine, they ran as smoothly as they could with barely any hiccups along the way. With Sparking Zero’s impressive arena selection from various locations around the franchise, different things, like weather and day/night settings, give the play that authentic feel. There are some stages I would like to see added into the mix, like Kami/Dende’s lookout, the Kame House, and even the fighting ground from Fusion Reborn, and I hope they're added on as DLC at a later date.

There are also in-game missions you can do to unlock new outfits, characters, and money (that you don't need to spend any irl money on) and even Dragon Balls that grant you wishes in-game. Besides these missions, you can even use the store to buy whatever you need, including even more characters. Needless to say, this game has a lot of replayability to help unlock everything you need to perfect your roster and reach that platinum trophy.

There is just so much I still want to do with this game. But for a first impression showcase, this is shaping up to be Bandai Namco’s best anime game ever made, let alone the best fighting game they've ever made. It’s filled to the brim with modes and there is still so much more I wanna go through. I’ll be back with an even more expansive review later, but as first impressions go, this game is very well worth it if you are a Dragon Ball fan of any capacity or if you just wanna settle some things with the homies. 


9/10 (so far)