Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero

Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero is a 3D team fighting game and expansion onto earlier games such as Budokai Tenkaichi, Budokai Tenkaichi 2, and Budokai Tenkaichi 3, in which players can form a team of five or go alone as Dragon Ball characters and pit them against another team and/or character. The game introduces several new combat systems such as Skill Count, Revenge Counter, and Vanishing Assaults, while retaining the counter and the dash system from previous games. It features both new and returning playable characters, forms, and stages, with the stages containing destructible elements, for a total of 182 playable characters.

Players can choose from any one of 100 characters at the beginning of the game, and have to unlock other characters using Zeni, an in-game currency earned by playing the game. The game also has 12 stages at launch.

Sparking! Zero was developed by Spike Chunsoft, and it was the first game in the Budokai Tenkaichi series since Dragon Ball Z: Tenkaichi Tag Team (2010) for the PlayStation Portable. The team described having a large roster of characters for the game was "challenging" since they cannot reuse any assets from the older games. Sparking!

Zero, unlike Dragon Ball FighterZ (2018), was not envisioned as an eSports game. Some characters, if they are weaker in the Dragon Ball canon, will remain weak in the game. To keep the game balanced, the team introduced the "cost" system. Each player only has a predetermined cost in each round, and stronger characters will cost much more than the weaker characters.

The game received "generally favorable reviews" from critics according to the review aggregation website Metacritic. Fellow review aggregator OpenCritic assessed that the game received strong approval, being recommended by 86% of critics. In Japan, four critics from Famitsu gave the game a total score of 34 out of 40.

Lewis Parker from Eurogamer described it as a "polished" and "rich" experience. While commenting that players did not need to be a fan of the series to enjoy it, it was "everything Dragon Ball fans will have wanted". He praised the extensive amount of fan service present in the game, singling out the Episode Battles and their branching player paths. Scott McCrae from PC Gamer described it as one of the best Dragon Ball games ever released, and wrote that the game was "mechanically complex". Concluding his review, he praised the game for successfully capturing "the magic of the original Tenkaichi games", and felt that its approach to storytelling and its diverse roster of characters "serve as the ultimate celebration of Akira Toriyama's classic".