Wondering what the Paste Games team has been playing lately? Don’t have time to read new game reviews, and prefer something quick and direct? Just looking for 1000 words to eat up a couple of minutes of your wait at the doctor’s office or airport lobby? Our new column Bytes ‘n’ Blurts offers a quick look at what games editor Garrett Martin and assistant games editor Elijah Gonzalez have been playing over the last week—from the latest releases to whatever classic or forgotten obscurity is taking up our free time. This week we look at the latest Dragon Ball game, one of 2024’s first big hits, and a recent smash that we simply can’t stop playing.
Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO
Year: 2024
Platforms: PlayStation 5, PC, Xbox Series X|S
The fighting game skill curve can look like an upwards pointing horseshoe. On the left you have the absolute beginner, the new player who knows no combos or strategies but just mashes the buttons as fast as they can and sees a surprising amount of success that way. Then you have the long, deep middle, where you start to actually learn the game and try to play it properly, and frequently get destroyed by the mindless button-mashers and true experts alike, before gradually improving and moving back up the rankings. And finally, after you put it all together, and actually know what you’re trying to do and how to do it, you’re back on top, at the right end of the curve, broadly able to defeat anybody stuck down in that horseshoe still trying to master the game.
I have spent most of the last week at the absolute dead center of the lowest spot of the shoe with Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO.
The brand new fighting game is the latest in the Budokai Tenkaichi series of 3D Dragon Ball fighters, and it’s proving to be a much tougher nut to crack than the more traditional Dragon Ball FighterZ—the only other Dragon Ball game I’ve ever played. I’m mostly sticking to the episode battles right now, the narrative track that summarizes storylines from the anime and challenges you to play through some of its most pivotal fights. It seems like a good way to both learn the game but also learn more about Dragon Ball, which I’m almost totally ignorant of. (As I wrote yesterday, I’m not a Dragon Ball guy. Didn’t grow up with it, never watched or read it, and all I know comes from one of two videogames, Sparking! ZERO included.) And I don’t know if any fighting game more fully supports that upwards pointing horseshoe theory.
Most battles in each Sparking! ZERO episode battle chapter can be easily beaten by pounding the buttons as quickly as possible. The first couple of fights in most chapters are basically gimmes used to set up whatever story is being summarized. And then there are always battles that, in order to follow the story of the anime, don’t need to be won; sometimes you just have to whittle the computer opponent’s health down enough, or survive to a certain point, and sometimes you can literally just lose the match and keep progressing through the story. You’ll often even win a match, seemingly, only to find out in the following cutscenes that your character didn’t actually win in the real story. I’d say the first two-thirds or so of every chapter in the episode battle mode isn’t really about competition; it’s about letting the player have fun and gain experience with the battle system in unchallenging bouts while watching heavily condensed episodes of Dragon Ball.
And then, suddenly, after breezing through a handful of quick and easy fights, the difficulty will spike to absurd heights and you’ll start to think you’ll never actually finish this, or any other, chapter ever again.
The first real sign of this comes in Goku’s episode battles, when that short sourpuss Vegeta somehow turns into a 200 foot ape-man and just constantly wrecks your shit over and over. One of the hallmarks of the Budokai Tenkaichi games, apparently, is that the different versions and transformations of Dragon Ball’s characters are their own unique fighters. That’s why there are almost 200 playable characters in this game; half of them seem to be different Gokus and Vegetas. So you’ll just be sailing along, flying and dashing through the game’s huge 3D levels, ripping through combos and Z Dashes and Super Finishers like it’s nothing, without ever really having to learn how and why these underlying systems work, or starting to understand its most complicated maneuvers and strategies, before smashing headfirst into the unbreakable wall of a mountain-sized space gorilla.
Yes, this is frustrating. Yes, it grows ever more frustrating as you keep flinging yourself at Great Ape Vegeta and losing, again and again. He’s not just insanely tall, but his size neuters a lot of the moves and combos you’ve relied on so far, forcing you to leave your safety zone, get creative, and actually try to learn what you can really do in this game. It never gets easy, but if you keep trying—and return to the training sessions, and move on to the early missions in other characters’ episode battles, and fight a lot of one-off exhibitions against the computer—you eventually should figure out how to beat this asshole. At which point you’ve already climbed a good bit of the way out of the other side of that pit at the center of the horseshoe.
