Sharing my thoughts months later even though I did play it at launch. Just because I actually have the time and energy now.
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I'm gonna talk a bit about Dragon Ball Z Sparking Zero now that the new game smell and hype has worn off. I actually played this game back when it originally came out and got 100% achievements after about a month of on and off with it. Only just now reviewing it because I was not in a good place last year as far as spare time or motivation were concerned. That said keep in mind everything I'm saying here is as a long time fan of Dragon Ball who has played many many Dragon Ball video games. Now, I've seen how they've handled updating the game and delivering the DLC, this is gonna be a bit more of a rant than a review. I do like this game but after writing the rest of this script I realized this is a rant and had to go back and reword this part.
So... let's get the absolute good stuff out the the way first. The graphics are spectacular. I remember some people whining about them not being good enough back when the game came out but I don't know what other Dragon Ball games they were looking at to make that complaint.
But even beyond the graphical improves over the most previous most recent installment which was a PS2 game in Budokai Tenkaichi 3 or even if you want to count Raging Blast as part of the series... A lot of other things got more attention to detail. Longer animations that are more faithful to the show for certain attacks and transformations are actually animated as they were done in the show instead of the character just powering up, flexing, and magically being in the new form.
Not to mention how great the destructible environments are. The gameplay in this game overall is solid aside from IMO their being too many options to counter attacks making you have to overthink too many things. But the real issue this game has is when it comes down to what there is to do in the game.
The options in this game consist of episode battle which for all intents and purposes is story mode. Custom Battles which has a selection of pre-made extra battles as well as the ability to create your own scenario. Regular Battles and World Tournament.
Aside from that the actual modes there is a challenges menu with a limited selection of feats to accomplish in other modes for rewards, the shop to unlock things, some galleries, and the sceen where you summon the dragon with the dragon balls.
So let's talk about episode battle. I touched upon this on my old channel when talking about Raging Blast 2 back in the day, where I kind of commended them for giving us a different mode to play through with each of the characters instead of having us play through the anime's actual story. There are a multitude of reasons I kind of hate replaying the official series story. For one we've done it over and over again in way too many games at this point. And while they tried to address it a little bit here it always feels kind of bizarre to play this game with a huge roster and get pidgeon holed into just playing as Goku for a huge chunk of the game to unlock everything.
It gets old starting with the Radditz fight and going through the entire timeline over and over again. But oddly enough with this game it feels like they just randomly decided to not even do that right. Since you have seperate pathes to play through as Goku, Gohan, Piccolo, Vegeta, and Trunks. But for some reason with Piccolo and Vegeta it doesn't even cover all of their battles. They both have battles in Super but they both just... stop in Z for this.
The mode has a decent little selection of what ifs but I feel like the way they handled it here is missing the potential that Tenkaichi 3 had. Since here you can only get what if battles for a character that already has a story mode to play through. But back in Tenkaichi 3 they had weird stuff like what if Devil Man showed up to stop Mecha Frieza instead of Trunks.
I think if they do make a Sparking Zero 2 the best way to make the game interesting is rather then once again playing through the story over again would be to have just a straight up what if mode with a huge line up of what if scenarios. Like maybe as an example what if Vegeta had let everyone one of Frieza's henchmen who offered to switch sides live and join him. Heck there would be no shortage of crazy scenarios they could raid from the Japanese exclusive Dragon Ball Heroes arcade games.
Next mode of interest here is the well... severely underwhelming custom battles. The pre-made ones I guess give you an extra batch of things to do that at least let you play as some characters who don't get the spotlight in story mode but as for actually making any of these yourself?
The dialogue limitations where you can only use pre-made dialogue and swap around key words and phrases is just too limited to really make anything particularly interesting or worthwhile. Unless something drastically changes I feel bringing this back for a sequel is just a waste of energy.
Moving on we come to battles. You can either do a one on one battle or do a team battle where you can assemble a team of characters based on how many points each character takes up. You can play these offline or how I'm assuming they expected most people to get hours in this game which is to play online against other players.
And I have to say... I hate online battles and I knew I would. Aside from not being into competitive PvP to begin with, these games have never even been balanced around that idea. Even though any character could theoritically beat any character certain characters are just better and certain characters are just weak because they're supposed to be.
So if you play online there is maybe a total of 10 or so characters you are going to see over and over again in spite of this game having a roster closing in on 200 characters. Because if you're playing against someone who is as good as you and you're using a weaker character you're going to lose. Heck certain characters have enough difference you might lose if the person is worse at the game then you. I only played this game online at all because the achievements required me to do 100 online battles and I mainly fucked around using King Kold cause I figured either I'd beat someone who is legit bad at the game or the fight would end quickly and lessen my suffering.
The only other mode to really do anything with in this game is World Tournament but after you've beaten each different tournament once and gotten their first time completion reward there is little to no reason to ever do one again. You'd be better off just beating up the AI in a regular battle unless you want the game to choose your opponents for you.
With all the modes covered this leaves me with a few others things to discuss. There isn't much I can say about the challenges or shop as they're all just a means to an end to unlock things in here. But as for the dragon balls. The worst grind in this to get all achievements was the achievement for summoning Porunga. If you bought like the most expensive edition of the game to get all the DLC and whatnot you start with the dragon balls to summon Shenron and Super Shenron and can summon them immediately and yes this does unlock their corresponding achievements.
But for really the bonus should have been the Namekian Dragon Balls because getting these things was an immense pain. Because with both the other sets you get complete sets of them from doing the story. Namekian Dragon Balls only drop randomly as drops after completing individual battles in battle mode. And even there the other Dragon Balls have a higher drop rate. Some people theorized they drop more on Namek but this seems to just be an assumption with no actual basis behind it and the best way to grind them seems to be to play on the world tournament stage against hercule and immediately ring him out with an energy blast then select rematch and keep doing it like a mad man.
I can't really complain about the roster in this... as much as I wish Mercenary Tao was in it. Though the odder ommission was King Piccolo seeing as they put in Kid Goku and had his ultimate move be the move he defeated King Piccolo with.
I honestly have a bigger beef with the DLC choices because they're all from the Super Hero movie or Daima when I was hoping they'd at least throw us a bone or two on some of the characters who were in Tenkaichi 3 that didn't make the cut. Not to mention the DLC has all just been characters, no extra modes and extra characters when you've more or less done everything is kind of... pointless.
If they make a sequel to this they really need to not make the Dragon Balls so annoying and we need to bring back some modes from older games like Mission 100 from Tenkaichi 3 or Galaxy mode from Raging Blast 2. We just all around need more single player content because generally speaking anime games typically aren't known for huge online competitive scenes.
I know my ranting here probably sounds like I hated the game but I really don't. I actually liked the game a lot and the fact that I liked it is the only reason I stuck with the game long enough for a bunch of these things to get under my skin. But I did all there was to do and all there was to see in less than 40 hours. While I have over 100 hours in Super Dragon Ball Heroes World Mission when that game doesn't even have achievements at all. I have 95 hours in Xenoverse 2 when I hated that game's story being a rehash of the first game but with movie villains thrown in, yet I have all those hours in it because it gave me stuff to do.
I wanted to play more Sparking Zero but there really wasn't any reason to. I do suggest owning this to anyone who consider themselves a Dragon Ball fan but I also suggest trying to get it on a deep discount. Don't pay full price like I did if you didn't already make that mistake.
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