The Dragon Ball Tenkaichi series is one that meant a lot to me as a teenager and young adult – which was about the peak of my obsession with Dragon Ball Z – but it’s also one that I haven’t really thought about or touched in the last 15 or so years. Fast forward to the present, and after about three hours of hands-on time with Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero, it felt like I was hit with a spirit bomb of nostalgia as I once again got back in there, chaining together rapid movement teleports, bouncing my foes like ping pong balls between multiple vanishing attacks, and kicking them away with so much force that they destroy mountains. It was like reuniting with a dear old friend, and yet, Dragon Ball Sparking Zero feels like much more than just a nostalgia play. It’s packed with new mechanics, a brand new approach to story mode, and a host of other exciting features that I only got a taste of, but I’m excited to dig more into once it comes out next month.
The first two hours of my hands-on time was spent on freeplay. I used a large chunk of this time to refamiliarize myself with the Tenkaichi style of gameplay by hitting up Sparking Zero’s exhaustive tutorial mode, which covers all of the many many mechanics present here. There are Vanishing Assaults, Vanishing Attacks, Lightning Attacks, Burst Smashes, Dragon Smashes, high guards, low guards, high speed evasion counters, perception counters, super counters, z-counters, and so on. It’s a lot to take in for sure, but it all serves to enhance the depth of the combat, and most importantly, deliver on the power trip of controlling some of the most powerful characters throughout all of anime. Sure, I might not NEED to know how to knock an enemy away, vanish behind them, drill them into the ground, and then pick them back up and hurl them away like a ragdoll – there are other, simpler ways to get just as much damage, if not more – but doing stuff like that feels so incredibly cool, and to me, that’s what the Tenkaichi series is all about.
Once I was back up to speed on the combat and mechanics, I decided to check out one of Sparking Zero’s big new modes outside of its story mode: Custom Battles. It lets you create, share, and play out your own fantasy Dragon Ball fight scenarios – complete with options to create an intro cutscene, a title card, mid-match triggers, and outro cutscenes that cover what happens when you win, and when you lose. There’s even a Mario Maker-style rule to it, where in order to share your Custom Battle with other players, you need to be able to prove that it’s possible by beating it yourself.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have the time to craft my own battle to the degree that I would have wanted, so I opted instead to see what the mode was capable of by trying out some pre-made battles that were prepped by the developers. And to my delight, they were a lot of fun, with a great variety of different types of fights. Some were simply based around the idea of pitting certain characters against each other: like a battle of speed demons that had you controlling Burter as you faced off against Kakunsa and Hit. Another had you as Kid Goku going up against Master Roshi to relive one of their training sessions, and forcingforced you to win the fight specifically with whatever move Roshi calls out.by using a Kamehameha.
Custom Battles have great potential as a sandbox for creative players to come up with and share exciting fights that go far beyond the limits of Dragon Ball’s canon. My favorite, though, had me playing as a weak and underpowered Captain Ginyu against an appropriately overpowered Frieza. My only hope for victory was using Ginyu’s ultimate technique, the body-change beam, to swap bodies with Frieza and then easily finish the fight. Easier said than done, as whenever I tried to power up to be able to use the move, Frieza would hit me with an instant-kill death beam. So I had to engage with Frieza in combat just enough to be able to charge my meter, knock him away, and then use that time to charge up into Sparking Mode so I could look for an opening to land the attack. It was a surprisingly tense and refreshingly unique battle, and a great showing of the potential that this mode has as a sandbox for creative players to come up with and share exciting fights that go far beyond the limits of Dragon Ball’s canon.
After the time for freeplay was up, I got a chance to check out a handful of Episode Battles, which collectively make up Sparking Zero’s story mode. Dragon Ball’s story has been told an ungodly number of times at this point across pretty much all forms of media, but what makes Sparking Zero’s interpretation especially cool is how it gives you multiple opportunities to do things differently from how they’re supposed to go. Right from the start of Goku’s episode battle, when Raditz takes Gohan away and Goku and Piccolo give chase, you actually don’t have to join forces with Piccolo. You’re given the option to instead go it alone, and if you do that, then you’ll be joined by Krillin and fight Raditz in a battle with a completely different outcome.
That’s not all either. Even if you decide to play it by the canon and team up with Piccolo, if you manage to defeat Raditz before Piccolo is able to charge his attack, you’ll be met with a special fully animated and voiced “Sparking Episode” that plays out this “what if” scenario of Goku surviving his encounter with Raditz, getting to train Gohan himself, and being there right when the Saiyans arrive on Earth.
Producer Jun Furutani told me that when selecting the battles that they wanted to highlight in Episode Mode, they wanted to focus on the battles that highlighted the playable characters the best in the story, but they also wanted to put a focus on battles that could potentially lead to branching outcomes.
I followed up and asked Furutani about how substantial these branches could be, to which he replied, “It’s a really hard question to answer because depending on which branch we’re talking about, it could skew very in a completely different direction. But some branches might just go back to the actual canonical route again. For example, when you fight Raditz, there’s some smaller branches that have been there, but it takes you back to the canonical route. And obviously after Raditz is Vegeta and after Vegeta is Frieza. Some of them are just blips, some of them kind of take you in a very drastically different direction.”
And while there are eight characters that make up Sparking Zero’s Episode Battle mode, they do seem to vary wildly in terms of length. I played 30 minutes of Goku’s and only got through the Saiyan saga; 30 minutes of Frieza’s only got me to the final battle against Super Saiyan Goku; and then 30-45 minutes of Future Trunks’ story from Dragon Ball Super pretty much finished it all up right there. Still, I’m very much looking forward to diving into all of these at launch and seeing if I can find all of the hidden “what if” moments myself. It’s worth mentioning too that they’re not easy to trigger. The fights themselves are already pretty tough, and to try and accomplish specific added challenges on top of that makes it seem like these are meant as rewards for the most dedicated players – doubly so because you can’t actually trigger these scenes if you lower the difficulty.
Beyond the Custom and Episode Battle modes, I also messed around with the tournament mode, which allows you to participate in one of many different types of tournaments, each with different rule sets. The Tournament of Power, for example, has you competing on the Tournament of Power stage with flight turned off and ringouts as an alternate win condition; Cell Games is a strictly 1v1 affair with no rules, but you only regain 20% of your life between fights; and Yamcha Games is straight chaos with random rules and random character selection. You can also create your own tournament and customize your very own set of rules as well.
And then finally there’s the encyclopedia mode, which I got to exclusively check out for a few minutes. It’s a returning feature from Tenkaichi 3, but instead of just having Chichi giving commentary on a character, this time you get Chichi, Bulma, and Videl all gossiping about the cast and giving their own little insights. The little bits I got to listen to were all very amusing, like the girls commentating on how ugly Goku becomes when he transforms into his Super Saiyan 3 form, or how Garlic Jr. looks like a roided-out Emperor Pilaf.
My relatively short time with Sparking Zero rekindled my love for the Budokai Tenkaichi games and was a much needed reminder that arena fighters can excite and thrill just as much as traditional 2D and 3D fighters can. The attention to detail here is phenomenal; the combat definitely has a learning curve, but is packed full of depth that is very satisfying to learn and engage with; and its story looks to provide a ton of flexibility in how it tells the tale of Dragon Ball. We’ll see how its final form turns out when Dragon Ball Sparking Zero releases next month on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.
Mitchell Saltzman is an editorial producer at IGN. You can find him on twitter @JurassicRabbit
