Dragon Ball Sparking Zero – First Impressions

After many, many years, Sparking Zero is finally here. A game many have waited for many years for has finally been released on early access for people who have pre-ordered the game and will be released on Friday for standard players.

Well, I’ve been playing it since I was able to at 11 pm UK Time on Monday and I think it’s time for me to give my first impressions, thoughts, and rating for the game.

Story

Now the story within Sparking Zero is slightly different. While it’s somewhat the story of Goku a story that’s been told in Manga, Anime, and games many times before, they skip through parts of the story and allow you to fight certain fights throughout Goku’s life.

The game also delivers many other similar stories, a story for Vegeta, Gohan, and more characters. There are around 7-8 different stories that you can play around with and the stories are not what it seems and this is a bold move within the game.

When playing through the stories for said characters, you can pick a choice of what to do and essentially create a “What if” type storyline throughout the character’s stories and this is something completely new to the Dragon Ball universe.

Characters

Now for a fighting game, you typically have large rosters, from WWE to Mortal Kombat to Injustice, you usually have around 30-0 characters plus downloadable content characters throughout the game’s life cycle.

Dragon Ball Sparking Zero on the other hand has a total of 182 base game characters on the roster and will be expanded up with downloadable content characters throughout the life cycle. 182 on-release character roster is insane for any game. This was mainly everyone in the universe but they still left certain characters off of the roster.

With the roster size you can choose to use the most powerful version of the character or you can simply take the base form of that character and grow their power in the battle and go through the different versions of the character in the game.

Issues

Sparking Zero is no means by far perfect as it does have issues from certain sounds to spam moves in fights to the actual release. Let’s talk about the sound first as this isn’t a major issue but it needs to be said.

While most of the sound in the game is good quality and well done. So far while I’ve been playing the game at times, the sound quality does go very quiet and not everything has voice-over. In certain sections, the characters do not speak, and is basically a stock image of them where you would need to press to continue it.

Now, I’ve only had issues with one fight within the game so far. Great Ape Vegeta. I played this and the CPU would spam the same move from the moment the fight began. It would always hit you. I won’t lie, I raged and lost my temper at it a little bit. I also looked online and many people were having the same issue.

My main issue was the time of release for the game. I ordered the ultimate edition of the game and it clearly stated “October 7th”. It downloaded and installed a couple of days earlier so I expected to be playing at midnight when it had just hit the 7th but I wasn’t. I figured I’d wake up earlier and play it before work.

To my surprise, it was still locked and would not allow me to play. The release should have been when it hit the 7th in the country you are located in, that is when you are allowed to play. I had to wait until it hit the 7th in other countries before playing the game. I lost basically a day of early access because of this. It left a sour taste in my mouth because of it.

Overall the game is great and is a game that I will continue to play for a little while.

Rating: 8.9/10

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