DRAGON BALL: Sparking! ZERO

Sparking! ZERO's store page says 86.7% positive across 72,074 reviews. Of its hundred most recent English reviews, thirty are positive.

That is the largest gap between lifetime and current sentiment I have measured, and it is six days old. On 30 July 2026 Bandai Namco released the Super Limit-Breaking NEO expansion, and the reviews since have been dominated by owners of the game's Ultimate Edition saying they are being asked to pay twice.

Reading a score during a revolt

A review written this week has to be careful, so here is the method rather than the conclusion.

Are these real players or a brigade? The recent negatives carry 29.7, 25.8, 37.8 and 23.2 hours. The hundred most-helpful negatives overall have a median of 58 hours and a maximum of 1,453. This is the existing playerbase, not an outside wave.

What exactly is disputed? The top negative, at 829 votes from 29 July, says an Ultimate Edition purchase around €110 no longer includes content the buyer expected, that the edition has since been delisted, and that the new material costs roughly €35 more. Others describe it as "one of the most anti-consumer moves I have ever seen from a major publisher."

What can I actually verify? That the expansion released on 30 July, that it adds a new mode, characters, episode battles and maps, and that the store lists 12 DLC entries against a NZ$89.95 base game. What I cannot verify is what the Ultimate Edition's terms originally promised, which is the crux of the dispute. I'm not going to adjudicate that from a review corpus, and any reader weighing a purchase should check the current store listing themselves — including which edition is actually on sale.

What I will say is that the shape of this is familiar. I reviewed Tekken 8 earlier today, where the defining grievance was also about sequencing rather than gameplay — a shop added two months after a full-price launch. Publishers keep discovering that changing the terms after the money has moved is the most reliable way to lose an audience that otherwise liked the game.

The game they otherwise liked

Because they did. Sparking! ZERO is the Budokai Tenkaichi sequel Dragon Ball fans spent seventeen years asking for, and mechanically it delivers: arena combat with vertical flight, beam struggles, transformation sequences, destructible environments and a roster that passed 200 characters by late 2025.

It is also the best-looking Dragon Ball game ever made. The cel-shading and effects work get close enough to the anime that clips are hard to distinguish from the show, and the sound design lands the impacts.

The pre-existing criticisms are worth knowing, because they're structural rather than about this week. Story mode is the biggest, at 34 of a hundred negatives — described as rushed, skipping Universe 6 and summarising arcs that deserved playing. Content volume for the price appears in 30, with a 127-hour reviewer calling post-launch support "historically bad" and noting the base game "has incredibly little content for such an expensive pricetag." Online appears in 36, including a connection error that reviewers with 100-plus hours reported as unfixed more than a month after launch.

And there's a design tension inherent to the series: Tenkaichi games are deliberately unbalanced, because a game where Yamcha fights Beerus honestly cannot be fair. That's charming offline and miserable in ranked play, which is why "cheese" appears in 13 of a hundred negatives and why a 141-hour player uninstalled over it.

The trajectory

The quarter-by-quarter shape tells the story cleanly: 34 negatives in the launch quarter of late 2024, then 6, 16, 12, 5, 5, 5 through 2025 and early 2026 as things settled — and then 17 in the current quarter, almost all in the last week.

That's not a game that has been getting worse. It's a game that was fine and then had a bad Tuesday.

The verdict

DRAGON BALL: Sparking! ZERO earns a 6.5. On combat, spectacle and roster it's an 8 or better, and for a fan of the series there is nothing else like it — 200-plus characters and the closest any game has come to looking like the anime.

The score reflects a NZ$89.95 game with thin single-player content, a rushed story mode, online problems that persisted well past launch, and — as of this week — an editions-and-entitlements dispute serious enough that its own players have driven current sentiment to 30%.

Buy the base game on discount if you love Dragon Ball; the fighting is genuinely good. Don't buy any edition or expansion right now without reading the current store page and the current reviews, because the one thing nobody can tell you today is what your money actually buys. I'd expect this to look different in a month — and this review is dated accordingly.