Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 3 left big shoes to fill 17 years ago for many fans of the anime, but it seems a new successor has finally arrived on the scene.
With the early access period upon us, reviews for Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero are starting to pour in, and they’re mostly pretty darn good.
After digging through the critical and fan responses to the huge arena fighting game, we’ve gathered up some highlights as to how the final product has turned out at launch.
Sparking Zero currently sits with a Metacritic score of 82 on PlayStation 5 including a few five-star ratings down to around the 60 or 70/100 range.
This makes the return of Tenkaichi action one of the highest rated Dragon Ball games of the past few generations, putting it ahead of Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot and Dragon Ball: Xenoverse 2.
There is one that still sits higher, however, with Dragon Ball FighterZ continuing to hold the top with a Metascore of 87.
For longtime fans of the franchise looking for bombastic battles and nostalgia trips, Sparking may be close to everything you could ask for.
This quote in particular stood out to us from PC Gamer’s review:
“In the 17 years since Tenkaichi 3, countless Dragon Ball games have attempted to recapture this same essence. None of them have. They’ve ranged from okay to terrible. Thankfully, Sparking! Zero this isn’t a Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5 moment; it nails the feeling of those PS2 classics. I felt right at home playing it all day, like I was 12 again and only taking breaks to watch a Vegeta x Papa Roach Last Resort AMV on YouTube.”
We’re seeing near universal praise for the game’s visuals across the characters, transformations, visual effects and even the environments that all clearly had a lot of care put into them though we’ve also seen a few notes that some animations can look a little off in motion.
And obviously having over 180 characters (including transformations) from all across the Dragon Ball franchise is going to be a big selling point.
The combat is largely hailed as well for the fast-paced action moving between all ranges and from the ground to the skies, but reviewers state it can take a while to fully engage because the in-game tutorials aren’t very intuitive.
IGN wrote, however, that the controls can feel unresponsive at times, and multiple reviewers noted it can be easy to get stuck on the environment at times.
The story mode isn’t as in-depth as Kakarot of course and only a couple of handfuls of fighters get their time to shine with playable chapters through Dragon Ball Z and only some of Dragon Ball Super, but there seems to be no real shortage of content and things to do even if it may get repetitive at a point with most of the cast controlling very similarly to each other.
That especially applies for the “what if?” story chapters that can be unlocked by achieving certain conditions and open up branching paths with alternate series of events — or even create some of your own.
There’s not a lot of talk, however, as to how the online matches feel as of yet, but we’ll probably be hearing more about that as players get their hands on it now.
It is also disappointing that local split-screen play is still only limited to the Hyperbolic Time Chamber stage.
You can find some of the notable Dragon Ball Sparking Zero reviews we’ve looked at below to go much more in-depth as to what the new game has to offer.
• PC Gamer – 80/100
• IGN – “From what I’ve seen of the single-player so far, the feeling of time traveling back to a simpler time when games didn’t have to be balanced or competitive to be fun is a good one. Reliving a story that was foundational to my youth, looking and sounding (mostly) as great as I remember it, with the opportunity to alter it in sometimes dramatic new ways is clever, and the addition of tools to attempt to create our own stories could elevate the experiment even further. But it’s hard to know if the custom battles will find a community that can push its limits, let alone make decent fights worth coming back to.”
• Noisy Pixel – 9/10
• Siliconera – 8/10
• VG247 – 4/5
• GameSpot – 6/10
• Gamereactor – 7/10
• Gamesradar – 3/5
• Saiyan Scholar – “I definitely think it’s the greatest in the Budokai Tenkaichi series. I personally think it beats the hell out of Xenoverse 2… So yes I guess I could say right now this is going to be the greatest Dragon Ball game of all time.”
• BltzZ – “Sparking Zero is a Dragon Ball fan’s endless playground and dream game. There’s no shortage of things to do.