Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero delivers spectacular anime battles

Featuring Vegeta, Piccolo, and TEN versions of Goku

Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero / Bandai Namco

DISCLAIMER: what you are about to read is written by someone who has never watched a single episode of Dragon Ball Z. But, in fairness, you don’t need to be a fan of the anime to appreciate punching someone through a building.

Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero is a 3D fighting game bringing wildly over-the-top anime battles to life. Opponents greet each other by yelling in untranslated Japanese (at least, it’s untranslated in my demo), tag each other with 15-hit combos, and leave stages looking like a hurricane’s blown through, all as they wage lung-busting war across land, sea and sky.

My hands-on is a 3v1 fight against Gohan, with a fresh character swapping in when one’s been knocked out. I pick Cell and Frieza, who I’m vaguely familiar with, and someone called Great Ape Vegeta, who is basically a gorilla in a spacesuit.

What I don’t realise is Great Ape Vegeta is actually 50 feet tall. Fighting Gohan is like trying to swat a bug. It’s difficult to even see him behind Great Ape Vegeta’s great behind. But then again, Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero seems less concerned with fine-tuning gameplay balance than making sure there’s not a single second where someone isn’t either shouting or getting punched.

Each character has three special moves on a cooldown, and a single ultimate ability they build up to by holding LT and straining their muscles really hard. It’s best done immediately after flinging your opponent off into the distance so they’re not in range to clap you back. Cell unleashes a white hot laser beam straight from his eyes, while Goku apologizes before reeling off a right hook that shakes the earth. 

Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero / Bandai Namco

We first fight on Planet Namek, then I select the Destroyed Planet Namek stage, which is basically Planet Namek in Hell. Oceans have turned to lava and the sky’s blood red. Impressive environmental destruction is difficult to appreciate in natural settings, but excels in stages like City, where you can punt someone into a bus stop or drop them on a parked car. 

Batting them into a building shatters the glass, although they’re too large to topple completely. Characters do suffer battle damage as the fight progresses, however, so you can knock people’s armor off. 

It doesn’t matter where the fight goes. The camera is locked onto your opponent so you’re drawn to them like a magnet. The bulk of battles take place in the air where you’ll spin and strafe around each other like in an aerial dogfighting game.

You can ascend and descend, fire projectiles, and engage in button-mashing QTEs to determine the damage dealt by certain moves. The action is as fast as it is unrelenting - evasive maneuvers even skip frames to give the impression you’re executing them faster than the eye can see.

At some point you’ll attack your opponent so hard they’ll careen towards the ground and land with a devastating impact, at which point you can zoom after them like a homing missile and leave a smokey trail.

Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero / Bandai Namco

The details are faithful to the anime, from the convincing voice actors to the effect that happens when you fight underwater and bubbles start emanating around you as the sound muffles, and that’s without mentioning the sizable roster.

The most popular characters get multiple variants. Frieza, for instance, has a Golden Frieza variant, which is Frieza but golden. There are also ten - ten - versions of Goku, ranging from ‘Goku Z-Early’ to ‘Super Saiyan God Super Saiyan’. The latter has a move called ‘limit breaker god kamehameha’.

Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero has two main modes. Episode Battles follow one of eight characters as you reenact famous fights from Dragon Ball Z and Dragon Ball Super.

Custom Battle, meanwhile, lets you select the number of combatants, rules and victory conditions, as well as pre-fight and post-fight cutscenes. You can even share them online so other players can download and play your epic anime encounter.

What happens when six Great Ape Vegetas have a planet-rumbling tag-team brawl? That’s the first thing I’m doing when Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero releases October 11, 2024, on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.