Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO Remembers What Budokai Tenkaichi Was Actually For

The core loop is built around vertical, destructible arenas rather than a fixed stage, and that single decision changes everything about how a fight reads. Characters fly, teleport-counter each other's rushdowns mid-air, and knock one another through mountains, buildings, and entire city blocks that do not reset between exchanges. A fight that starts in a quiet valley can end in a crater, and the terrain damage is not cosmetic: line of sight, cover, and available space all shift as the environment gets chewed up, which gives even a straightforward one-on-one bout a sense of consequence most arena fighters only fake.

The moment-to-moment combat rewards reading your opponent rather than memorizing strings. Ki blasts can be countered with well-timed guards, teleport clashes turn into brief tugs of war when both fighters commit at once, and the vanishing-step dashes that let you close or break distance are fast enough that a single missed read can cost you half a health bar. Ultimate attacks and transformations are gated behind resource management rather than handed out freely, so pulling off a screen-filling signature move feels earned rather than scripted, even when you have seen the animation a hundred times before.

The roster is the game's other headline strength, and it is built for range rather than just raw count. Characters pulled from decades of the source material sit alongside each other, each with a genuinely different toolkit rather than a reskin with a new coat of paint, so switching from a grappler-style brawler to a zoning specialist actually changes how a match is played, not just how it looks. Newcomers who do not know the lore going in can still pick a fighter that appeals to them and get real mileage out of it purely on movement and feel.

Online play is where the promise gets shakier. Ranked matchmaking has drawn real frustration from players who find themselves paired against opponents several tiers above their own skill level, and a thin population outside peak hours makes that gap harder to smooth over. It is a fixable problem in principle, but out of the box it can turn what should be a confidence-building climb up the ladder into a series of one-sided losses, especially for anyone new to the genre's execution demands.

The story mode is built around narrated retellings of the anime's major arcs, letting you replay pivotal battles with altered outcomes and branching what-if paths. The concept is sound, but the execution leans heavily on static illustrations and narration to cover story beats rather than full cinematic sequences, and that gap is the single most common complaint from players who came in expecting the cutscene spectacle of a modern anime tie-in. Treated as connective tissue between fights rather than the main event, it does its job. Treated as the reason to buy the game, it disappoints.

A scenario editor lets players script their own hypothetical matchups outside the main campaign, mixing and matching fighters and conditions in ways the official story never touches. It is a quieter feature than the headline combat, but for anyone who has ever wanted to stage their own dream fight, it is exactly the kind of tool that keeps a roster this large interesting long after the story credits roll.

Local split-screen deserves a mention on its own, since so few modern fighting games bother with it anymore. Two players sharing one screen and one couch changes how these matches get talked about, less a ranked grind and more the kind of loud, chaotic argument-starter that arena fighters used to be built around. Pairing that option with full controller support and the camera comfort settings mentioned earlier suggests the accessibility work here was not an afterthought bolted on for a checklist, but a real attempt to widen who gets to sit down and enjoy the spectacle.

Visually, the game commits hard to reading as the source material in motion rather than a game merely based on it. Cel-shaded character models hold up at speed, energy attacks light up entire battlefields with the kind of oversaturated glow the anime is known for, and the scale of the arenas makes even the smaller fighters feel like they are throwing around genuine city-leveling force. Destruction is not just a particle effect layered on top; buildings crumble in ways that persist for the rest of the round, and that persistence does more for the sense of spectacle than any single explosion could.

Camera work is doing a lot of quiet heavy lifting here. Locking onto an opponent mid-dash while the environment blurs past sells speed better than raw frame count alone would, and the game knows when to pull back and let a transformation or an ultimate attack fill the whole screen without cutting away from the actual fight happening underneath it.

Sound design leans on the franchise's signature effects work, punchy impacts, screaming energy charges, the distinctive whoosh of a teleport dash, and it is loud in the way a show built on shouting attack names has always been loud. It suits the material. This was never going to be a subtle game, and it does not pretend otherwise.