Game Review - Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero

Now you might be wondering, "Nehiri! Why the hell does this game have 2 different ratings for it's gameplay"

Well my dear reader, it's because one of the ratings for competitive play and the other is for the way the game is meant to be played. You see, the Budokai Tenkaichi games are party games where you just sit down with your buddy or buddies and have dumb fun. It's mostly because the balancing isn't one of the dev's biggest concerns. HOWEVER, just like all fighting games that came out in recent time, this game added an online ranked feature.

There are several problems with this online play. First one is obviously the balancing as I said earlier. Especially with items being a thing, every ranked match is just against the same characters with the same items.

Second problem is lag. You see, Budokai Tenkaichi games require extremely precisely timed inputs. There are QTEs for both players when you beam clash, grab clash or dash clash. All of them requiring precise inputs to be on top, you need to react quickly to revenge counters by holding your perception key, you need to press block the exact moment enemy's attack hits you to instant transmission behind the enemy and so on. But in online play, there will always be delay and that delay will be slightly different against every opponent which makes all of these extremely difficult to deal with.

HOWEVER, the game itself is not bad because of this. If you play the game as intended, AKA with friends for fun, then the game is really fun but not perfect. The game clearly had a lot of passion behind it and it shows with extremely small details, but the game has a lot of small shortcomings all clearly born from a lack of technical knowledge from the dev team. Controls are clunky at times, sometimes buttons just get stuck for no reason, for some ungodly reason friendly matches have a timer for selecting character that you can not turn off, a lack of random OST or character button etc. I'm gonna use the words of my friend LowClassWarrior here, "the game feels like the last sip of coke"

What in the actual HELL went wrong in the creation of this game's story.

There's supposed to be 7 characters with stories and "what if" scenarios but like, 70% of "what if" scenarios don't have an actual continuation.

The main stories are so ass too because they are all just missing stuff. Why does Gohan not have the Saiyan arc, why does Vegeta's story cut off after the Majin Buu arc, why are they all just so short. In the trailers they said "characters that's been in the series for longer will have more story content" but I guess that only applies to Goku.

Music is well... It's good I guess, but lacking. The game has very few tracks and most of the iconic tracks are locked behind DLC. The fact that you can't change your music easily between battles also adds to the repetitive feel of the OST since it's very rarely worth going all the way back to the lobby to change it.

The main theme is great, the rest of them are okay at best. I don't have much to say about this game's music since again, I barely get to listen to it.

Yeah this game is all over the place man. They tried making a couch-play party game into a competitive game and failed horribly. It's still fun with friends but they really need to patch the hell out of this game immediately.

Would I recommend this game? Absolutely, IF you have friends to play with. Normally Budokai Tenkaichi games have a lot of singleplayer value too since y'know, back in the day you couldn't just play online so the devs had to put a lot of care into the singleplayer mode too but the singleplayer mode in this game is so lacking in content that it's barely worth the price.

I hope this review gives me enough motivation to keep writing reviews. Anyways give kudos so I can feed my family with the attention I get.

Also have a picture of the man commonly known as "The Drink" who is also my main lmao