Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO Deluxe Edition

I went in braced for nostalgia bait and came out genuinely surprised by how much mechanical weight sits under the flashy surface. Sparking! ZERO is a 3D arena fighter built squarely on the bones of the old Budokai Tenkaichi series, updated with Unreal Engine 5 visuals and several new systems that change how matches actually play out. The Skill Count meter gates your transformations, fusions, and Sparking Mode activations, meaning you are constantly making small resource decisions mid-fight rather than just hammering the attack button. The Revenge Counter acts as a combo breaker when you are getting walled, and Vanishing Assaults let characters teleport-dash through space in a way that makes a thirty-second exchange look like a proper anime sequence. When two evenly matched players are both sitting back, charging ki, and daring each other to rush first, the tension is real and nothing else in the genre recreates that particular Dragon Ball rhythm. The roster of 182 characters is the headline and it earns that billing. Nearly every form and saga gets representation, from the Saiyan arc all the way through Dragon Ball Super, and most fighters feel distinct enough to justify their slot thanks to unique specials, voice interactions, and in-universe power gaps that are deliberately not balanced out. Mr. Satan is not supposed to beat Jiren, and the game leans into that asymmetry rather than apologising for it. Episode Battles give you character-specific story campaigns for Goku, Vegeta, Gohan, Piccolo, Future Trunks, Frieza, Goku Black, and Jiren, with branching Sparking episodes that ask whether Goku could survive the Saiyan saga alone, or what happens if Gohan takes a different path entirely. These what-if threads are the single-player highlight. The Custom Battle mode, which lets you build and upload your own fight scenarios with custom dialogue and conditions, adds a creative outlet that keeps content flowing long after the campaign ends. That said, the rough edges are hard to ignore. The tutorial is spread across beginner, intermediate, and advanced lessons that throw information at you faster than any single session can absorb, and story mode difficulty spikes arrive early and without warning. Several critics and a chunk of the community flagged the AI as either too passive or suddenly relentless depending on the encounter, and early online play had real balance issues around a handful of dominant characters and mechanics being exploited. The menus are genuinely clunky to navigate. Split-screen multiplayer is locked to a single map, the Hyperbolic Time Chamber, which stings when the rest of the arenas are so much more interesting. If you are coming in without an existing Dragon Ball connection, the Episode Battles will feel like a highlights reel with context stripped out, because the writing assumes you already know why Cell Games matters. For the audience this was built for, though, the product is close to what fans spent seventeen years asking for. The game looks the part in a way no previous entry managed, running at a speed that makes fights feel genuinely hectic without turning into pure visual noise. Online competition, once you invest time in the training room and find characters that suit your style beyond the obvious top-tier picks, has a higher ceiling than the early-access chaos suggested. The Custom Battle ecosystem and continued DLC support give the title a longer shelf life than a pure single-player arena fighter would normally get. If you play casually with a friend in the room, manage your expectations around the one split-screen map, and are at least a passing fan of the franchise, there is a lot here to dig into. If you want a tightly balanced competitive fighter with a smooth new-player ramp, look elsewhere.

Alex · Scout Team

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