What can I say? I’m still a kid at heart. Dragon Ball was the first franchise I loved before I even knew what the word “franchise” was. Why was a five-year-old allowed to watch a brutal anime where an equally young child gets his neck broken on an alien planet? Who knows, but I’m so glad my parents never gave a shit because Dragon Ball has been part of my life for decades now and my fandom was reinvigorated this year due to Dragon Ball Sparking Zero.
Officially announced a year ago at The Game Awards, Sparking Zero arrived in all its glory in October. Within a couple of weeks of owning it, I put in 60 hours, impatient with my desire to try every character, use every super, explore every branching path. The game is a delight, and provided a much-needed spark to an otherwise sluggish, dreadful, (insert your dour adjective of choice) 2024.
I’m not just referring to the various apocalypse-signaling events of the world at large in 2024, but the small, everyday apocalypses of my life. Due to job losses, financial anxieties, the continuing realization that the people you love are getting older, and the all-too-common day-to-day blues, this past year was quite the struggle, to put it succinctly. So what did I do when times turned bad? Encased myself in video games, and, after ten months of waiting, encased myself in Sparking Zero.
I remember being seven or eight and dumping my spare change into the machine at Wegman’s for $17 dollars, roughly half the cost of The Legacy of Goku, and being overjoyed that my parents paid for the rest of the game. I remember turning eleven and being gifted Dragon Ball Advanced Adventure for my birthday, which I played the whole drive home the next day from Universal Studios. I remember being a 19-year-old freshman pouring hours – fucking hours – into Dragon Ball XenoVerse grinding Dragon Balls so I could unlock Dragon Ball GT characters. I remember being 25 in the dark days of the pandemic, splurging on a sale purchase of Dragon Ball FighterZ to whittle the days away after finally starting (but not finishing) to watch Dragon Ball Super.
And I hope sooner rather than later I look back on 2024 not as a year of hardship, but as the year I was a 29-year-old freelance writer (sounds much better than unemployed, ya know?) who played the hell out of Dragon Ball Sparking Zero until the wee hours of the morning for nights on end.
Dragon Ball Sparking Zero is a marvel and everything a fan from the series would want from the next Budokai Tenkaichi/Sparking! game. The Sparking Episodes are a joy to experience, giving Goku, Vegeta, and more alternate destinies. The custom battles give the community a chance to show off its creativity and give the game endless replayability. The fights are bombastic, utilizing every inch of the 3D arenas to deliver anime-worthy bouts. The roster is overflowing with your favorite characters, of which there are so many that not even 182 slots can perfectly capture every fighter from every Dragon Ball series. (I will gleefully eat up any and all roster DLC past the Super Hero and Daima packs, so, please, give me more.) I could go on and on about how great of a game it is, but I encourage you to read my review for more thoughts on Sparking Zero as a game.
If there’s one thing I want to take away from this horrid year – aside from how great the damn games were – is that our fandoms will always be there for us, providing escape from the upsetting realities of the world outside our windows. 2024 was, for me, the year of Dragon Ball. The day I was laid off this past summer, I went through with my evening plans of finally finishing Dragon Ball Super’sTournament of Power arc for the first time, basking in Goku’s intense battle with Jiren to save his universe from annihilation. It provided an escape for me in ways that Dragon Ball – and so many other fandoms – had before. With Super finished, I then had a four-month wait until the next series, Dragon Ball Daima, and Sparking Zero dropped. An agonizing – agonizing, I say! – period where I gobbled up every character reveal trailer and even watched YouTubers’ early gameplay videos, something I hadn’t done since college. I couldn’t wait for Sparking Zero, not just to play it, but to escape into it.
Once it arrived, Dragon Ball Sparking Zero was everything I wanted and more – and certainly my choice for 2024’s Game of the Year.
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