Sparking Return!

I am going to be talking about Dragon Ball Sparking Zero today, first I will introduce the game and talk about its presentation, narrative and gameplay then I will jump into the UX aspect of the game.

This franchise is something I have been playing since I was in school, I remember pushing the disk for Budokai Tenkaichi one into my PS2 and just getting excited to play as Goku, Gogeta and Vegito. These games were a big part of my childhood and now the franchise returns after 17 years.

The big difference from the other Dragon Ball (DB) games when it came to Budokai Tenkaichi (BT) was that it was 3D. Opening up the DB games to a completely new type of gameplay. These games were also known for their absolutely huge roster of playable characters. BT3 had about 163 characters in it, but that number has been surpassed by Sparking Zero.

Sparking Zero (SZ) brings back the tradition of the franchise with the 3D gameplay and the immense roster. This time, there are about 182 characters in total, but many of them are variations of the same character, representing different arcs in Dragon Ball. For example, there is 'Goku Early' from the Saiyan saga and 'Goku Mid' from both the Frieza and Cell sagas.

Another classic tradition of the franchise is the dynamic main menu and submenus. These menus not only feature dynamic backgrounds but also include audio interactions where characters converse with one another. Presented as animated images, these conversations really make you feel like you are in the Dragon Ball universe and provide context for which submenu the player is currently in.

SZ brings this feature back with a greater effect! In SZ the characters are all displayed in real time with their actual in game models, and just like the anime and manga, the menu follows Goku the main character! So anytime we change to another sub menu, Goku in the menu moves to a different location. For example the sub menu for the shop takes place on Master Roshis island, and the encyclopedia is in Hercules house.

Similarly the sub menu where you can enter the story mode takes place with Lord Beerus and Whis in it, this plays into the narrative of the game. Since the game tells the story of our characters before they met Beerus and Whis. The narrative is presented as a flashback with Whis showing Beerus the journey of the Z fighters.

The attention to detail really speaks to the love put in the game by the developers. It works wonderfully while also living up to the history of the franchise.

Coming to the combat and the narrative of the game its better than what we have seen before. The story still is told in a not so great manner, with sort of slides that are presented to players and then short cutscenes ranging from a minute to three minutes. This is still better than the old games where they just had characters talk to each other and that was it. Here we can still see some fights within the cutscenes. There is also the option to go first person to look at the environment and see what the player character sees.

The combat has been refined and modernized for a newer audience. Its simple to learn but hard to master, there are some issues with it such as abilities with some characters but overall its a great system and makes me always want to go back and play some more.

Coming to the UX side of things, there are a few things I do not appreciate about the game and think it could do better in that department.

• Settings cannot be changed after a certain point: This is one of the bigger problems I had with the game. Settings cannot be changed once you are in a specific game modes menu after the sub menu. This was particularly a pain point when I had just started playing and wanted to try out different settings by changing my controls.

• Bonus objectives and default objectives: The game has alternate what if story paths that spawn from certain scenarios in the game, these paths can only be traversed if you finished a specific task or objective in the mission you are playing. Most of the time this will be beating your opponent as quickly as possible. The problem here is that the game has no way of telling you how quick. There is a timer in the UI but it does not work for the alternate story path. The problem with this is, if I am repeating a mission to get an alternate path and I am trying to do it as quickly as possible, when I fail and a cutscene is triggered there is no way for me to restart, since I am locked in to the cutscene. The game offers no way of quitting from a cutscene as some are not in engine. This proved to be a huge annoyance while playing the game to completion as I was not sure if I beat an enemy quick enough so the only way for me to know is to let the cutscene proceed and by that point I cannot quit. There should be some indicator for the player to let them know they have done the bonus objective.

• Menu inefficiency: The menu efficiency is a small one but something that can be improved nonetheless, I observed this while in a match lobby where I had lost the match against some other player. For some reason the game brings you all the way back to the sub menu and not just screen after that, like the character selector. This makes the process of losing or quitting all the more painful. Similarly if I am changing characters I have to go all the way back to the sub menu rather than just character selector. And while setting up these matches there is a lot of the same button pressing which becomes annoying.

• Uninformative Training: The training for the combat in the game is unusual, what I like is players do get to see how a certain technique or combo can be pulled off by the game itself. But the text prompts are uninformative and do not tell you in the instruction menu what buttons need to get pressed unless you actually click on that specific combat or technique training. The game also throws terms at you a lot and expects you to know them already which I struggled with. One major gap in the tutorial is that the game does not explain how to deal with clashes, which occur when two opponents perform similar attacks, such as opposing beam waves or rushing moves. Players are expected to figure out the mechanics on their own using on-screen prompts. These create scenarios where the players have to do some sort of button press which is timed. I had to watch a Youtube video to figure it out.

These are some of the bigger ones, right now there is also some unresponsiveness with the combat while pressing some button configurations but the developers have said that will be patched soon.

One thing I did not mention is that right now to get the what if scenarios which are a huge selling point for the game, you need to play on the highest difficulty. This might prove problematic for people struggling with the game difficulty and create an accessibility problem. I hope the developers really reconsider this as some players will never get to experience the rather unique scenarios.

Overall, Sparking Zero is a fantastic game and a huge return for this franchise that was supposedly dead. I loved every second of it despite there being some UX issues which can be easily patched or fixed depending on the back end workings of the game. Some of the design decisions might have some reasoning behind them and I might not have been able to figure them out.

In conclusion, these observations reflect my overall experience with the game. I appreciate your time in reading this analysis and look forward to sharing my insights in future posts.