Compared to the dire days of Battle of Z and Ultimate Tenkaichi, the last decade has been incredible forDragon Ballgames. We’ve been feasting for some time thanks toXenoVerse,Kakarot, and especiallyFighterZbut, as great as those games are, something has been missing - Budokai Tenkaichi.
As great as those Dragon Ball games are, we’ve been asking for a Budokai Tenkaichi andanother chance to break controllers during Beam Clashes for as long as I can remember, and thestart of this year finally confirmed that our wish to Shenron was coming.
I’ve been excited about the new Budoaki Tenkaichi since it was announced, but even with my blind loyalty to anything dee bee zee, I’ve held myself back from getting too thrilled until we saw more. Sure, this new game was wearing a gussied-up version of Budokai Tenkiachi’s skin, and it certainly looked the part, but could it ever live up to all the years of hype and expectations?
It seemed impossible. Having bombastic battles and going back to the 3D arena fighter style of Budokai Tenkaichi was easy enough, considering XenoVerse was halfway there with some wonkier combat mechanics, but the big appeal of the series has always been its at-the-time record-breaking roster size of 161 characters (including transformations). That roster is made up of Dragon Ball mainstays, but the real joy was being able to play as smaller less-important characters like Android 8, Kid Goku, Mr Satan, and Arale, something that newer games haven’t allowed room for.
That herculean chonker of a roster only happened back then because it had two other games to help build it up, something that a modern entry in the series wouldn’t have after so much time without a new game. Combine that with how expensive and time-consuming games are to make nowadays, and the fact that we had no idea who was developing it when it was first announced, and it felt like a new Budokai Tenkaichi was setting itself up to disappoint.
Curse my old age for making me cynical,as the recent gameplay reveal trailer for what is now called Sparking Zero, and all the information we’ve heard about it since, has calmed those fears. Somehow, Spike Chunsoft has actually pulled it off - Sparking Zero looks like everything we’ve ever wanted from Budokai Tenkaichi 4.
Beyond looking on par with the series’ most beautiful game, FighterZ, instead of XenoVerse’s toy-like 3D models, Sparking Zero’s gameplay footage instantly showed that, mechanically, it’s aiming to replicate and improve upon what Budokai Tenkaichi introduced. Everything that made that game what it is, like big 3D arenas, snap vanishing behind opponents, and beam clashes, are all present and accounted for and with big improvements like being able to deflect attacks and curve beams to try and meet your opponent.
Put simply, Sparking Zero looks like it actually plays like a Budokai Tenkaichi game instead of just being similar to it like Raging Blast was. That’s because Spike Chunsoft is finally back at the helm, something that I doubted would happen after the disaster that was Jump Force.
Playing like Budokai Tenkaichi is just one of Sparking Zero’s many wins. It’s also aiming for a “historic” roster size, indicating that we’ll have even more characters to play as than we did in Budokai Tenkaichi 3. Considering how perfect each character looks in the trailer, I’m stunned that Spike Chunsoft has set its sights so high, let alone managed to do it, but, if done right, it shows how seriously it takes doing the series justice for its revival.
The gameplay reveal trailer for Sparking Zero confirmed a number of playable characters, including Goku, Vegeta, Frieza, Broly, Krillin, Trunks, Krillin, and a whole lot more.
It would have been so easy for the team to treat Sparking Zero as a reboot of the series that doesn’t aim for such a huge roster and only has the big ones you’d expect from Dragon Ball Z and Super. But withreports that it’s including fighters from Daima, Dragon Ball, and GT, it looks like the spirit of Budokai Tenkaichi, and the thing that everyone loved about it the most, is being kept alive. It has freaking Bergamo as a playable character for the first time in a game, so anyone and everyone is on the table.
The glimpse we got at Sparking Zero might have only been a minute long, but it was more than enough to prove to Dragon Ball fans that their wishes over the last decade and a half have been heard. There’s still a lot we don’t know, like whether it’ll have the series’ beloved loading-screen minigames and a ton of bonus content to mess around with, but, considering all that we know so far, my doubts have been put to rest. This could be the ultimate Dragon Ball game we’ve all been waiting for.
