After an afternoon playing Bandai Namco’s upcoming fighting game Dragon Ball Sparking Zero in sunny San Diego, California, and chatting with the game’s producer, I came away with a better understanding of who the game was designed for.
Producer on the game Jun Furutani explained to me that if certain characters from the game’s extensive roster were matched against each other and executed specific moves, they would trigger special animations that perfectly mirror how those characters fought in the Dragon Ball anime.
Giving players the tools to replicate their favorite fights from across Dragon Ball’s history is exactly the fantasy that Sparking Zero, which comes out Oct. 11, wants to fulfill — and one that fans haven’t seen in games since the last mainstream Budokai Tenkaichi game was released for the PS2 back in 2007.
“The fans who waited nearly 20 years, we consider them to be the core audience of this game,” Furutani told CNET through a translator. “People who played the previous title 17-plus years ago will be able to pick up the controller and they’ll feel right at home. But at the same time, we wanted to make this a proper evolution of the previous title.”
While I had a chance to briefly try out Sparking Zero at Summer Game Fest in June with a limited roster, this time I was given an in-depth, 2-hour session to try out the various game modes and all 182 characters included in the final version, including Mini Goku, the preorder-exclusive young version of the series hero from his Dragon Ball days.
I walked away feeling even more impressed with what the game has to offer fans of the various manga and anime series that make up the Dragon Ball universe, even as someone who’s only watched through the early Dragon Ball Z era.
Casual fans or those without any Dragon Ball experience will be left a bit in the dark, especially when parsing through the very similar characters — 90 of whom are Saiyans, the proud warrior race, with most being slightly different variations of Goku and Vegeta. Naturally, serious Dragon Ball fans will enjoy pitting those variations pertaining to specific eras against each other to make their own “what if” fights, and the game has plenty of tools to let players customize how they go down.
Like its predecessors in the Budokai Tenkaichi series of arena fighters, Sparking Zero is easy to pick up and jump straight into fights. Players assemble teams of one to five fighters to face off against equally sized enemy teams, flying through large 3D areas. The gameplay revolves around mastering the right punch-and-kick combos and when to charge up your special bar to fire off signature moves. This will be enough to get most players started, but the skill ceiling rises with the addition of other limited-use-per-fight special moves unique to each character, as well as a counter system.
There are plenty of tweaks to the system since the last game in the series, including a powerful final move available once fighting power is charged to maximum. Where it will end up sitting with fans remains to be seen, but the game gives players a big sandbox to relive their favorite moments from Dragon Ball’s history — or create their own narrative fights.
Pit your favorite characters against each other in custom battles or play in premade ones in Bonus Battles.
Fulfilling your custom Dragon Ball fantasy
Beyond the basic custom battle mode, where players can whip up a fight between their favorite characters, Sparking Zero shines with a few modes that amp up the narrative power and creative possibilities of the Dragon Ball universe.
Sparking Zero’s most straightforward “story mode” lets players run through the biggest fights of some of Dragon Ball’s most iconic characters. The first, and the one Bandai Namco had me play a couple times, is Goku’s story, which starts at the beginning of Dragon Ball Z, when the iconic fighter takes on his Saiyan brother Raditz. (Aside from a few characters from Dragon Ball, there’s not much homage to the original anime and manga that started the franchise.)
Whether players are defeated or survive the fight against Goku’s Saiyan brother (matches include different win conditions), they have a unique choice thereafter: for Goku to accept Piccolo’s help, as the story goes in canon, or reject it and chart a new path. This “what if” quality ups the replayability, but also puts players far off the beaten path of the shows they know and love. There are even secret bonus fights if certain conditions are met. After Goku’s story, I got to jump into Frieza’s and even into Goku Black’s tales.
“We wanted to show off the ‘what ifs,’ because while you’re playing as that character, you don’t always want to lose when you’re supposed to lose, you want to know what would have happened,” Furutani said.
That “what if” feature is more broadly available in the Bonus Battles mode, which has a ton of one-off fights between certain characters and includes a scenario set up by a brief intro cinematic. Some of these face-offs are serious in canon, like pitting androids 16, 17 and 18 against Gohan, Vegeta and Krillin. Others are more fun, like Gohan trying out for the in-universe movie version of the Great Saiyaman superhero by taking on “kaiju,” which includes some of the colossal characters on the roster (like Vegeta transformed into his Great Ape version).
Menu settings to tweak conditions in custom battles — specifically, to trigger effects when certain conditions are met.
In truth, these bonus battles are premade examples of the big sandbox at the core of Sparking Zero, which allows players to create their own battles. There are so many ways to customize fights, like picking a simpler template or an existing battle and editing it to your liking. But if you want to make your own bonus battle with all the customization toggles, you’ve got a lot of choices to make, from which characters to include to what happens during the battle that might change its conditions. You can even change characters’ poses and facial expressions in cutscenes.
Let’s say I want to start a fight with some deep bench Dragon Ball characters like Yajirobe, Yamcha, Tien and Chiaotzu to see how they’d fare against Frieza’s Ginyu Force. I can make an intro cinematic with some generic text and start the fight. But as Earth’s defenders get pummeled — say, to 40% of their health — I can add a triggering effect that refreshes their HP or damages the opponent or increases CPU difficulty and then add another cutscene (Yajirobe passes around Senzu beans!) with filters, effects and camera angles. I can even make NPC characters (including those not on the fighting roster, like Bulma and Chi-Chi) show up.
Cutscenes before, during and after fights can be customized.
When you’re done with your masterpiece, you can put it online for others to play, though you’ll have to beat your own match before being able to upload it (no nightmare Mario Maker level situations here). Whether players will end up creating a ton of fun fights and passing them around is tough to say, but the tools are there for them to recreate the schoolyard fantasy versus battles in a video game.
For those who decide to pit fighters from iconic battles in the various Dragon Ball anime series, there are Easter eggs in the form of special animations that replicate how those characters fought in the original scenes. For example, Furutani explained, if you take Super Saiyan 2 Teen Gohan and perform a throw against Perfect Cell, it’ll look like it did in the show.
“There’s a lot of these mini Easter eggs in the game that we want players to find,” Furutani said.
For fighting fans, not competitive fighter purists
Over the years, Dragon Ball fighting games have fallen into two distinct categories. The 2D games, similar to Street Fighter or Marvel vs. Capcom, are more tuned for competitive play. The most recent entry, Dragon Ball FighterZ (released in 2018), has even become a staple in tournaments and minor esports. On the other hand, the 3D Dragon Ball games are designed more for fans to relive iconic scenarios from the series, rather than for elite competitive play.
This distinction continues in Sparking Zero. Much like its Budokai Tenkaichi predecessors, the new game is a lot of fun to zoom around in, dashing or flying across levels and pummeling your enemy or doing standoffs while charging power for special moves. It’s a delight, but the gameplay is loose, and I didn’t feel the precision I’m used to in a small-area 2D fighter, where microseconds mean the difference between landing combos and pulling off counters.
Not that there isn’t depth in the combat. As I played through Goku Black’s story, I got annihilated by tough CPU opponents who had mastered blocks and counters that required good timing and built-up ability energy, showing me that there was a skill ceiling still up there for me to reach.
But the more I played through the 182-character roster, the less distinct they felt, even when accounting for the dozens of slightly different Gokus and Vegetas. Despite having plenty of unique attacks, fighting with them felt very similar: punch combo, block, charge, special move. Admittedly, this could change when I have more than a couple hours to dive into the roster and understand subtle differences in special movesets and more complicated mechanics like transformation.
Where the characters really stand apart from each other is in their strength. Some are significantly more powerful — not just the higher-level Super Saiyan Gokus and fusion-combined Gogetas, but also Frieza, Majin Buu and the later villains in the series. Their stats are supercharged, dealing more damage and boasting extra bars of health.
“A strong character in the anime would be very strong in this game,” Furutani said. “The Dragon Ball experience is high up there in terms of importance.”
This is anathema to a fighting game with characters meticulously balanced against each other, but the imbalance is the point for fulfilling the fantasy: Sparking Zero wants you to pit Perfect Cell against a squad of the Z Fighters, because that’s how it goes in canon. Or see how he’d do against his creator, Dr. Gero, or against a different version of Future Trunks. That power is in the hands of the player to make their own set of custom battles and sagas.
“We’d love to see something that we, the developer team, didn’t even expect was even possible,” Furutani said.
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