Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero is accurate Dragon Ball—for good and ill

Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.

It’s perfectly fitting that new Dragon Ball fighting game Sparking! Zero is both needlessly complicated and kind of base-level, repetitive simple—while also being undeniably energetic and fun as fuck. After all, that’s a pretty good description of the overall tone of the late Akira Toriyama‘s manga and anime classic itself, a franchise that has now played out, for 40 years, as a sort of lushly animated version of kids smashing their action figures together, constantly insisting that their guy has just reached a new power level that makes them the biggest, strongest, most important boy in the universe.

Built from the resurrected corpse of the old Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi games—not to be confused with the Dragon Ball Z: Budokai games, because you really can’t grasp how many goddamn Dragon Ball games there have been over the years—this newest game applies modern paint to an old formula, pitting 185 different fighters against each other in toybox-style confrontations that aim to mimic the high-speed, bombastic battles of the original series. (Do a lot of these 185 characters play alike, often because they’re just 16 different variants of series protagonist Goku? Yes, welcome to Dragon Ball.) When the fights work exactly like they’re supposed to, they’re genuinely thrilling affairs: High-speed attacks, sudden reversals of fortune, lots of dashing through the air and sudden blink-step teleports. The first time you pummel an opponent, and then combo into unleashing a massive anime laser beam straight into their face—gorgeously animated, with this being maybe the best the series has ever looked in a video game—the thrill is irresistible.

The 50th time, well…

Full confession: We’ve only experienced Sparking! Zero—the name is both a translation of the old “Tenkaichi” title and a reference to the “Sparking” Super Mode that lets you beat the crap out of your opponents in far more efficient fashion—in single-player mode, because we’re absolutely terrified to subject ourselves to the sort of fighting game fans who would choose to master this particular niche. Running through the plotlines of the original Dragon Ball Z, up through the more recent Super, these Story Mode fights are undeniably pretty cool, especially when they engage in one of the series’ mainstay mechanics: Branching alternate universe plotlines that can veer off wildly from established canon, usually when Goku or one of his buddies wins a fight they’re traditionally supposed to lose. But the actual fights, once you overcome their basic learning curve, also bear a repetitiveness that’s rooted in the fact that so many of these characters have near-identical movesets. You punch, you fly, you teleport, you charge your meters, you try to get off a massive Blast attack—all of which have, true to form, unskippable, often 10-second-long cutscenes attached to them—and then repeat until you or your enemy have been beaten to a pulp. Characters yell different stuff—the voice acting is series-accurate, as always—but the 50th time you’ve heard Goku scream “Ka…me…ha……me……ha!” in a tone of heroic exertion, you can feel like you’re trapped in a bit of a rut.

(It doesn’t help that the game’s interface, at least on the PlayStation 5, often feels distractingly clunky; the actual combat controls are smooth, give or take a few bugs we hit during the game’s pre-release review window, but actually navigating story mode, or skipping cutscenes the fifth time you’ve watched them in the lead-up to a fight that’s been kicking your ass, feels needlessly cumbersome. Games as demanding as Sparking! Zero really need an option to quickly iterate on challenges, and the slowness of getting around menus was a major source of frustration throughout our time with the game.)

Which brings us back around to Dragon Ball itself, because our experiences with Sparking! Zero really did map on to our history with the wider franchise: Initial frustration, as you work out the series’ weirdly convoluted internal logic. (God help anyone tackling this tutorial for the first time, and being asked to keep track of, say, the differences between a Dragon Dash, Z-Dash, Dragon Homing, Vanishing Assault, etc.—every one of which your AI opponents will happily unleash on your face at a moment’s notice once you get into the actual fights.) And then, a several-hours-long sweet spot as you realize, hey, this is actually fun, lively, exciting, even thrilling. (The first time you come out on top after you and an opponent have traded a series of blinking counter-attacks, which can escalate multiple times, feels cool as hell.) And then, a sort of exhaustion that sets in as you realize the game, and the series, only has so many tricks in its bag. Dedicated fighting game fans, looking for something a little different to sink their teeth into, might find something interesting here; dedicated fans of the series, meanwhile, have already bought it. Those of us who are tourists in this high-flying world will have at least a few hours of a good time with it—but might want to wait until it eventually goes on sale before taking the trip.