It’s been 17 years since Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 3 and its 3D arena battles graced consoles, and fans have been clamoring for a return to this old style ever since. Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero has answered the call, offering a whole new story arc to explore thanks to Dragon Ball Super, which was only part of the Dragon Ball canon in 2013. For the most part, it’s still the Tenkaichi approach that works thanks to its fast and energetic combat system; However, the repetitive gameplay and limited mode options leave you wanting more of this fight.

Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero is a return to the old Tenkaichi format, where two fighters wage war in an open arena lined with buildings, rocks, cliffs and more just waiting to be destroyed. Each fighter has a mix of physical and Ki-based attacks, highlighted by flashy and bombastic special attacks like Kamehameha, Final Flash, Spirit Bomb and other iconic Dragon Ball techniques.

As is immediately apparent, Sparking Zero’s visual style is top notch, from the main menu to the heat of battle. Each character moves and fights fluidly, and the little scenes that play out during a successful ultimate attack are a joy, making the connection to these movements even more exciting. In particular, attacks like the direct Kamehameha performed by Ultra Instinct Goku’s character form – the animation complete with scenes ripped straight from the anime – are a great end to a fight.

It’s exciting to move around the arena and approach a fight, but soon every fight turns into button-pushing exercises. Each character in the roster has the same basic control scheme: close-range physical attacks are assigned to one button, short Ki blasts are assigned to another, and special moves are performed by holding down a shoulder button while pressing either of these two buttons. They can also dodge, dash, rise into the air or fall back to the ground, and counterattack while being attacked. Finally, when a character charges their Ki past full power and activates Sparking, they have access to a devastating ultimate attack.

The adrenaline is present in every game, as hitting the attack button is very close to the quick punches and kicks from the anime, but if you’re looking for complex, skill-based combat, you won’t find it here. In fact, most fights follow a familiar loop: the match would start, we’d launch a few attacks and throw the opponent away, then we’d charge up our Ki meter and repeat the process until the match was over.

There’s an exciting energy to this type of combat – firing off a Super Spirit Bomb and watching the sequence play out is extremely satisfying every time – and it’s really fun and interesting to learn about the different characters in Dragon Ball’s story to learn. However, the lack of depth in the core combat scheme means it has limited shelf life and is better suited to quick play sessions rather than marathon games. Then again, this also applies to previous Budokai Tenkaichi games, and that hasn’t stopped die-hard fans from enjoying it, so series veterans may feel right at home.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Episode Battle, the core single-player experience in Sparking Zero. Here you choose one of the main characters of the franchise and progress through the story from that character’s perspective, fighting all the major battles that character faces along the way. The cutscenes between each fight range from still images with voices talking over them to short, fully animated scenes with a conversation between different characters.

This creates a repetitiveness that, while the fights themselves are fun, quickly wears off as the cutscenes don’t contain much more than a few jokes before moving on to the next battle. This repetition is exacerbated by a few strange difficulty spikes scattered throughout the adventure. Granted, most of these come at the high points of the series and in contrast to the big bads of Goku’s adventures, but some of these peaks are downright unfair; No matter how big Great Ape Vegeta is, this ape shouldn’t be able to do a 10-hit combo without flinching, grabbing you before you can land hit number 11, and immediately one to deplete Goku’s five health bars. Additionally, losing a fight results in a short but unskippable cutscene playing before you can decide to try again, and multiple defeats mean you have to run through that cutscene multiple times, with the same voice clips playing each time become. This gets annoying quickly.

There are some attempts to add variety to the episodic battles, as some of the cutscenes offer choices or victory conditions that lead to branching storylines. These choice-based moments are a novel way to spice up the saga’s oft-trodden storylines – particularly the storylines of Dragon Ball Z. In an early decision, when Piccolo turns to Goku to fight Raditz together, you can choose to follow his Dodging the invitation and doing it alone, leading to Krillin joining Goku instead and creating a “what if” scenario.

These isolated incidents are nice, but ultimately they only lead to one or two additional fights before you’re back on the established path – making these “what ifs” little more than temporary distractions. Episode Battle as a whole does a good job of retelling the winding story of the Dragon Ball series, but with the exception of the Dragon Ball Super storylines, this is an area that has been covered many times before, and the choice-based alternate routes don’t do enough to address it to mess things up.

In standard games, the number of playable characters in the Sparking Zero roster is in the triple digits: 181 to be exact. However, as is common with Dragon Ball fighting games, this number is artificially inflated by the faces found in some of these slots. First of all, there are 19 different versions of the series hero Goku, including four “basic forms” – in which Goku is in his normal, black-haired state. Each Super Saiyan to Ultra Instinct transformation has been given its own slot, as have his child versions of Dragon Ball GT and this version’s transformations. This 19 figure also does not include Goku Black – Dragon Ball Super’s villainous alternate version – and his various forms, nor are Goku’s various fusions with Vegeta and these transformations included.

Goku isn’t the only one with excessive roster representation, as Vegeta holds 14 spots (again, not including fusions or his GT villain alternate Baby Vegeta), Gohan holds 11, and Trunks holds nine. Even villains are not immune to these filling techniques, as Frieza, Cell and Buu also take up at least five slots each. Some of these shapes can even transform into other shapes mid-game, making the overabundance of “unique” character slots seem even more arbitrary.

Admittedly, having all of these different shapes represented is a good thing, and to the game’s credit, not every shape is an exact copy of the other. Combo animations vary depending on the form, while the special moves performed while holding down R2 also vary – think of these more like Echo Fighters in Smash Bros. than unique characters. However, since the game’s control scheme is the same for every character, these unique moves feel less special when the same buttons are pressed to trigger them. This character list is very bloated and you only need to look at the selection screen to see how it’s done.

This huge squad can compete both offline and online in singles matches and world tournaments, although the latter leaves something to be desired. In our time before the game’s release, we were only able to connect to one online game, despite trying multiple times in different ways. The game ran well for the most part, with only occasional stutters, but without a full player base to work with, this small selection could give away the actual experience. Your mileage may vary on launch day.

Sparking Zero also offers Custom Battles, where you can design a battle with custom cutscenes that play before and after the battle. In-game editors let you select scenes, backgrounds, poses, and even dialogue for the characters, then upload the scenarios to an online server for others to test. This idea is very cool in theory because it allows you to create your own mini-episode of the anime and highlight it with a big fight. In practice, however, there is a major limitation that impacts the personal touch the mode strives for.

This problem affects dialogue because what you can “write” is not free text; Instead, you have to choose between a list of pre-written phrases and choose which characters say them. Certain words highlighted in green in the pre-written sentences can also be replaced with others, but again, your choices are assigned and not free-written. The risks involved in giving free rein to the dialogue for these scenes are understandable, but this lack of freedom completely hinders the entire idea. The lines provided are generic and limited and don’t create much tension in the scene, making the mode feel disappointing.

Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero does an excellent job of immediately bringing the Budokai Tenkaichi format into the modern day. However, many of the pitfalls of that earlier era – lack of variety in the control system, shallow gameplay, limited mode selection – have also made the journey through the decade-plus hiatus. The core combat experience is fun and exciting, and it looks great in motion, but it quickly becomes repetitive. The modes available here allow you to relive your favorite Dragon Ball stories from different angles, but the experience wears out quickly.

While Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero is fun, ultimately this return to form doesn’t spark as much joy as we’d hoped.