A lot has changed about both video games and the way we play them since the last mainline entry in the Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi series. As the first direct sequel since the PlayStation 2 generation, that means there’s something charming about Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero’s old school design and presentation compared to other fighting games on the market today. It’s tougher than Vegeta’s chest plate, and imbalanced in ways that are both annoying and lore accurate.
Menus are labyrinthine, training tips are sparse and sometimes not very useful. But every battle is crafted with the sole purpose of putting the Dragon Ball fighting fantasy as it appears in the anime into our hands. The fast paced ki slinging, teleport kicking, and magical hair dying is great fun (when it’s not marred by responsiveness issues).
The few areas Sparking! Zero does truly try to innovate, primarily with its branching story mode and create-your-own battles toolkit, are promising too. But while I've still got a bit more to see before my final review, so far playing this brawler feels just as much like a labor of love as the effort to resurrect the series in the first place. Arena fighters don’t have a lot in common with their traditional cousins like Tekken or Street Fighter.
Instead of the fight taking place on a horizontal plane, they pair full 3D movement in largely open spaces with slimmed down movelists, trading technical complexity for spatial tactics. Tenkaichi further distanced i.