“DRAGON BALL: Sparking! ZERO” was released Oct. 7, 2024 on the PS5, Xbox Series X|S and Steam. “DRAGON BALL: Sparking! ZERO” is the newest game in the line of fighting games in the “Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi” series. The game’s predecessors include Budokai Tenkaichi 1, 2 and 3. The game was developed by Spike Chunsoft and published by BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment.

“DRAGON BALL: Sparking! ZERO” follows the Dragon Ball anime series, from “Dragon Ball Z” to “Dragon Ball Super.” It offers a colorful and plentiful cast of characters to play when on your journey throughout the series and when playing online. When I say plentiful, I mean it; “DRAGON BALL: Sparking! ZERO” offers 181 playable characters including different super saiyan power-ups, transformations and fusions you can use in battle. 

This fighting adventure game is an area brawler that adds a destructible land feature that will make you feel more powerful than ever. You can fight hand-to-hand or from a distance using special projectile moves like bombs or lasers, making this game’s controls extremely pleasing and exciting, allowing for creative fighting strategies and freer movement. 

Don’t want to play because you feel you have to know the characters or story to know what’s going on? Fortunately, the story mode focuses on campaigns centered around some of the most notable characters from “Dragon Ball” such as Goku, Vegeta, Gohan, Piccolo, Jiren, Trunks, Goku Black and Frieza. These campaigns are all unique and offer different battles that are taken from the story of the anime. Each campaign has a feature to have “what if” battles, where players can explore an alternate outcome of the story, allowing different characters to be played and for the player to experience an interesting twist to the original story they know.

One of the game’s most interesting features is the ability to create custom “what if” scenarios. Players are able to choose what arena the battle takes place, including characters and your own custom dialog during cutscenes. This creativity allows the player to show off their imagination and create their fantasy Dragon Ball fights. Unfortunately, you, in doing so, allow players to also create something… horrid.

An interesting feature of “Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero” is the DP battle system. This online battle system allows players to make a battle team of up to five different characters with 15 points to spend on different characters. More powerful characters that have better stats have a higher cost, while those weaker have a lesser cost. This makes it so you can have either a smaller team of stronger characters or a larger team of weaker characters, pushing players to strategize what members to use for their battle party. 

Although, due to some characters being much weaker than others, this does lead to match-ups during the online battle that can lead to one player immediately taking out the other player’s weaker characters, leading to an advantage for the other team. But then again, that is in itself another draw to the game; the media surrounding Sparking Zero comically emphasizes how screwed players are when they realize that the fight is completely one-sided all because they wanted to use all five of their slots.

The game has an audience rating of 4.1/5 as well as a 7/10 by IGN, a 9/10 by TheGamer and 80 percent by PC Gamer. On release day, over three million copies of “DRAGON BALL: Sparking! ZERO” were sold globally and there were over 90,000 concurrent players on Steam according to Game Rant. The reaction to the game has been more positively received by newcomers to the Dragon Ball franchise and those returning years later, with there being a new spark of online media relating to the game. “DRAGON BALL: Sparking! ZERO” may not be your jam, but it is always something to consider playing.