After spending an afternoon in sunny San Diego, California playing Bandai Namco’s upcoming fighting game Dragon Ball Sparking Zero and speaking with the game’s producer, I had a better understanding of who the game was aimed at.
The game’s producer, Jun Furutani, explained to me that when certain characters from the game’s extensive roster were pitted against each other and specific moves were performed, they would trigger special animations that perfectly matched the way those characters fought in the Dragon Ball anime.
Giving players the means to recreate their favorite fights from Dragon Ball history is exactly the dream that Sparking Zero, coming out October 11, aims to fulfill. It’s a dream fans haven’t seen in games since the last mainstream Budokai Tenkaichi game came out on PS2 in 2007.
“The fans who have waited almost 20 years, we consider the core audience for this game,” Furutani told CNET through a translator. “People who played the previous title 17 years or more ago can pick up the controller and they’ll feel right at home. But at the same time, we wanted to make this a real evolution of the previous title.”
While I was able to briefly try out Sparking Zero at the Summer Game Fest in June with a limited selection, this time around I got an extended 2-hour session to try out the various game modes and all 182 characters from the final version, including Mini Goku, the young version of the series hero from his Dragon Ball days, who was available for pre-order exclusively.
I walked away even more impressed with what the game has to offer fans of the various manga and anime series in the Dragon Ball universe, even though I’ve only been following Dragon Ball Z since the beginning of the era.
Casual fans or those with no Dragon Ball experience whatsoever are going to be left a bit in the dark, especially when it comes to analyzing the game’s very similar characters — 90 of them are Saiyans, the proud warrior race, most of whom are slightly different variations of Goku and Vegeta. Of course, serious Dragon Ball fans will enjoy pitting those variations from specific eras against each other to create their own “what if” battles, and the game has plenty of tools to let players customize how they go down.
Like its predecessors in the Budokai Tenkaichi arena fighter series, Sparking Zero is easy to pick up and jump into battles. Players assemble teams of one to five fighters to take on enemy teams of the same size, flying through large 3D environments. Gameplay revolves around mastering the right punch and kick combos, and when to charge up your special bar to unleash signature moves. This will be enough to get most players started, but the skill ceiling rises with the addition of other special moves, limited to use per fight and 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 finishing move that becomes available once your fighting power is maxed out. Where it will ultimately land for fans remains to be seen, but the game gives players a large sandbox to relive their favorite moments from Dragon Ball history — or create their own narrative battles.
Pit your favorite characters against each other in custom battles or play in pre-made battles in Bonus Battles.
Fulfilling Your Own Dragon Ball Fantasy
In addition to the standard battle mode, where players can engage in combat between their favorite characters, Sparking Zero boasts a number of modes that take the storytelling power and creative possibilities of the Dragon Ball universe to the next level.
Sparking Zero’s most straightforward “story mode” has players running through the biggest battles of some of Dragon Ball’s most iconic characters. The first, and the one Bandai Namco had me play through a few times, is Goku’s story, which begins at the beginning of Dragon Ball Z, when the iconic fighter takes on his Saiyan brother Raditz. (Aside from a few Dragon Ball characters, there isn’t much in the way of homages to the original anime and manga that kicked off the franchise.)
Whether players are defeated or survive the battle against Goku’s Saiyan brother (matches have different win conditions), they’ll be presented with a unique choice afterward: Will Goku accept Piccolo’s help, as per the canon, or reject it and chart a new path? This “what if” quality increases replayability, but it also takes players far outside 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 delve into Frieza’s and even Goku Black’s stories.
“We wanted to show the ‘what if’ scenarios. When you play that character, you don’t always want to lose when you have to lose. You want to know what would have happened,” Furutani said.
That “what if” feature is more widely available in the Bonus Battles mode, which features a bunch of one-off fights between specific characters, each with a scenario set up by a short intro cinematic. Some of these showdowns are serious in canon, like pitting androids 16, 17 and 18 against Gohan, Vegeta and Krillin. Others are more fun, like Gohan auditioning for the in-universe movie version of the Great Saiyaman superhero by taking on “kaiju” that include some of the more colossal characters on the list (such as Vegeta transforming into his Great Ape version).
Menu settings to adjust the conditions in custom battles, specifically to activate effects when certain conditions are met.
In reality, these bonus battles are pre-made examples of the large sandbox at the core of Sparking Zero, which allows players to create their own battles. There are many ways to customize battles, such as choosing a simpler template or an existing battle and editing it to your liking. But if you want to create your own bonus battle with all the customization options, there are a lot of choices to be made, from which characters to include to what happens during the battle that can change the circumstances. You can even change the poses and facial expressions of characters 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 movie with some generic text and start the fight. But if the Earth Defenders are getting pummeled — say, down to 40% of their health — I can add a triggering effect that refreshes their HP or damages the opponent or increases the CPU difficulty, and then add another cutscene (Yajirobe hands out Senzu Beans!) with filters, effects, and camera angles. I can even make NPC characters (including ones not on the fight list, like Bulma and Chi-Chi) appear.
Cutscenes before, during, and after battles can be customized.
Once you’ve finished your masterpiece, you can put it online for others to play, but you’ll need to win your own match before you can upload it (no nightmarish Mario Maker level situations here). Whether players will end up creating and sending around a whole lot of fun battles is hard to say, but the tools are there to recreate the fantasy of schoolyard versus battles in a video game.
For those who choose to have fighters from iconic battles in the various Dragon Ball anime series do battle, there are Easter eggs in the form of special animations that mimic 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 will look just like it does in the show.
“There are a lot of little ‘easter eggs’ in the game that we’d like players to find,” Furutani said.
For fight 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 geared towards competitive play. The most recent entry, Dragon Ball FighterZ (released in 2018), has even become a staple in tournaments and small 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.
That distinction continues in Sparking Zero . Like its Budokai Tenkaichi predecessors, the new game is a lot of fun to zoom in, sprint or fly through stages, and pummel your enemy or perform standoffs while charging up power for special moves. It’s a joy, but the gameplay is loose and I didn’t feel the precision I’ve come to expect from a small-footprint 2D fighter, where microseconds make the difference between landing combos and executing counters.
Not that there isn’t depth to the combat. As I played through Goku Black’s story, I found myself being destroyed by tough CPU opponents who mastered blocks and counters that required good timing and built-up ability energy, showing me that there was still a skill ceiling I had yet to reach.
But the more I played through the 182-character roster, the less they felt distinct, even when you factor in the dozens of slightly different Gokus and Vegetas. Despite their many unique attacks, fighting them all felt very samey: punch combo, block, charge, special move. Granted, that might change once I have more than a few hours to delve into the roster and figure out the subtle differences in special movesets and more intricate mechanics like transformation.
Where the characters really differ is in their power. Some are considerably more powerful — not just the higher-level Super Saiyan Gokus and fusion-combined Gogetas, but also Frieza, Majin Buu and the series’ later villains. Their stats are supercharged, they deal more damage and have extra health bars.
“A strong character in the anime would be very strong in this game,” Furutani said. “The Dragon Ball experience is high on the list in terms of importance.”
This is an abomination for a fighting game with characters that are carefully balanced against each other, but the imbalance is the point of fulfilling the fantasy: Sparking Zero wants you to pit Perfect Cell against a team of Z Fighters, because that’s how the canon works. Or see how he’d fare against his creator, Dr. Gero, or another version of Future Trunks. That power lies in the hands of the player to create their own set of custom fights and sagas.
“We would like to see something that we, the development team, didn’t even think was possible,” Furutani said.
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