DRAGON BALL: Sparking! ZERO Super Limit-Breaking NEO Edition

This is for the people who wore out a Budokai Tenkaichi 3 disc and have spent the years since asking why nobody rebuilt it, and it is flatly not for anyone who wants a clean, balanced competitive fighter with a patient tutorial. I want to be clear about that split up front, because it explains almost every design decision here. Sparking! ZERO is an arena brawler that cares about making you feel like a Saiyan first and about fairness a distant second. If that trade sounds bad to you, walk away now and nothing that follows will change your mind. If it sounds like exactly what you have been missing, it delivers harder than anything else in the genre. The combat lives in three dimensions in a way most fighting games never attempt. You fly, you charge ki, you Dragon Dash across half an arena to close distance, and you spend that ki on beam attacks, Blast Stock skills and transformations that rewrite your entire moveset mid-round. The defensive layer is where it gets interesting: Perception lets you read and reverse an incoming rush, Vanishing Assault turns a clean hit into a teleport-and-counter exchange, and Super Counter exists specifically so a losing player can flip a combo if their reflexes hold up. Learning to bait those tools instead of falling for them is the actual skill curve, and it is steeper than the flashy presentation suggests. Arenas break apart around you, mountains get flattened, and the camera pulls back for cinematic ultimate finishers that are still fun to watch on the fiftieth viewing. Solo content is better than I expected and thinner than it looks. Episode Battle runs branching campaigns from the perspectives of Goku, Vegeta, Gohan, Frieza, Piccolo and Goku Black, and the hook is that beating optional conditions unlocks what-if outcomes that break from the anime. Winning fights you were scripted to lose opens genuinely different endings, which gives replay value the mode would not otherwise have. The catch is that each individual route is short and it assumes you already know the source material cold, so newcomers get a highlight reel rather than a story. Custom Battles is the sleeper feature: a full creator with dialogue, victory conditions and staging that lets players build and share their own scenarios, and the community output there has kept the game alive longer than the campaign ever would have. Now the rough parts, and there are several. Online balance is the big one. The roster runs past 180 entries, but a large chunk of that number is transformation states and costume variants of the same fighters, and the genuinely top-tier picks are far stronger than the rest. Ranked play tends to collapse into a handful of characters spamming the same handful of tools, and the DP team format encourages stacking one monster rather than building a squad. The camera also struggles badly when a large-bodied character is involved or when a fight drops into tight terrain, and you will lose rounds to losing sight of your opponent rather than to being outplayed. Local play is the other sore spot: split-screen exists only in a limited form rather than as a full free-for-all versus mode, which is a strange omission for a series people remember playing on a couch. Whichever edition bundle you land on, extras stacked on top do not change any of that; the base game is what you are actually buying. So who wins here. Anime fans who want to stage fights the show never gave them, lapsed Tenkaichi players chasing a specific two-decade-old feeling, and anyone who enjoys learning a chaotic system for its own sake rather than for a leaderboard. Who loses: tournament-minded fighting game players, people who need a structured single-player campaign to justify a purchase, and anyone hoping for a couch multiplayer night. It does one thing exceptionally well, which is making a Dragon Ball fight feel enormous, and it is visibly uninterested in doing the rest to the same standard. Go in knowing which of those you are buying and you will have a great time.

Alex · Scout Team

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