I didn't become a Dragon Ball fan until I was an adult. That's maybe an odd way to get into a franchise that speaks to the 11-year-old boy in us all, but it meant I never got into the Dragon Ball Z video games that I would have in the mid-2000s, and the legacy of the Budokai Tenkaichi series entirely passed me by. But going hands-on with the latest entry in that series at Summer Game Fest, I feel like I could maybe capture what I've missed. Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero is a delightful toybox of destruction that gets right at the heart of what's made the franchise so popular across so many generations.
This game, notably, is not titled Budokai Tenkaichi 4, instead going back to the original Japanese series title of Dragon Ball: Sparking. "Now it's a time where we see that the games are released worldwide, at the same time, under the same name," producer Jun Furutani tells me via translator, "and we also see the community and the players interacting with each other about the same game and the same experience. So we thought it was important to have the same name worldwide for these games."
