DRAGON BALL: Sparking! ZERO

I came into Sparking! ZERO the way I come into most arena fighters: skeptical that the hype is doing the heavy lifting. Seventeen years since Budokai Tenkaichi 3 is a lot of goodwill built up on nostalgia alone, and Bandai Namco knows their audience. So does it actually hold up as a competitive, online-first fighting game, or is it a fan-service package dressed up as one? The answer is genuinely both, and where you land on that depends entirely on what you showed up for. The combat system is the core argument for buying this. You build teams of up to five characters, swap in and out mid-fight, and transform between forms on the fly. The combo structure is approachable on the surface, shoulder button plus face button for specials, but the real depth lives in positioning, counter-timing, and resource management. Teleporting behind an incoming ki blast with a well-timed block, or using Dragon Homing to juggle an opponent through the air, feels genuinely expressive once it clicks. The 181-character roster covers Dragon Ball Z, Super, GT, and the original series, and the scale of the stages makes kaiju-tier fights with Great Apes and giant bosses feel properly chaotic. The Unreal Engine 5 presentation is hard to argue with: beam clashes, aura effects, and environmental destruction look ripped straight from the anime. Character voice interactions at fight start add a layer of personality that rewards franchise knowledge. Now the parts that matter to me specifically. The netcode does not use rollback. The producer confirmed this before launch, citing the open 3D arena as a poor fit for prediction-based systems. In practice, the experience is extremely connection-dependent. Match quality filtering lets you restrict lobbies to connection rank 4 or higher, which helps, and close-region matches can feel nearly input-lag-free. But cross-play is not supported, so your PC pool is PC only, and opponents with weak connections drag the whole session down with them. If you are used to the tight online experience in Street Fighter 6 or Tekken 8, manage those expectations before you hit ranked. There is a ranked mode, and a World Tournament mode for structured bracket play, but the competitive ceiling here feels intentionally low. Characters are not balanced for fairness. The producer said as much: strong characters are depicted as strong. Whether that is charming or frustrating is a personal call. Episode Mode is the single-player backbone, and it is both the most ambitious and most divisive thing in the package. You pick a character and play through their perspective on Dragon Ball sagas from the Saiyan Saga through the Tournament of Power. What-if branching paths, where you can diverge from canon and see alternate outcomes, are genuinely fun and give the mode real replay legs. But the narrative is fragmented across separate character paths, which makes it land as scattered and context-free if you are not already deeply familiar with the source material. The tutorial is solid, Gohan training under Piccolo is a nice touch, but the game throws a steep learning curve at casual players after it ends. Custom Battle mode, where you create and upload scenarios for other players, adds community-driven replayability that could keep the game relevant for years. Bottom line for PC players: this runs well, supports full controller input and HDR, and the offline content alone is worth serious time investment for Dragon Ball fans. The online side is functional but not polished, wired ethernet recommended, and no rollback means geographic proximity matters more than it should in 2024. If your play group is local or you are mostly here for Episode Mode and Custom Battles, the rough online edges are easy to overlook. If you want to grind ranked competitively and care about consistent frame data and input fidelity online, you will hit a ceiling faster than the game deserves.

Fred · Scout Team

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