Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO

Play it on: PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Windows (Steam Deck YMMV)
Current goal: Hit B rank online

I didn’t expect Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO to keep my attention, but here we are more than a month later and I’m still having a blast getting my ass kicked in random online matches. As I’ve progressed, the rest of the game has left me feeling surprisingly underwhelmed, but Sparking is really good at the thing that matters most: making online matches feel like all of the made-up battles fans played out in their heads while watching the anime or reading the manga all those years ago. Finishing off a stranger’s Gogeta with Krillin’s destructo disc ultimate in the closing seconds of a hard fought match remains an S-tier gaming experience, and Sparking delivers it with beautiful animations and decent enough online stability. While Dragon Ball FighterZ remains the superior fighting game from a purely competitive point of view, Sparking has mostly given fans the Budokai Tenkaichi 4 experience they’ve been dreaming of for years. I can definitely feel it sticking in my PS5 rotation for months if not years to come. — Ethan Gach