The Dragon Ball fandom is abuzz about the newly announced Dragon Ball Xenoverse 3. At Summer Game Fest, we were able to get a glimpse into the gameplay as Bandai Namco showed us a playable demo of the game. We weren’t able to play it, of course, but we were able to watch it get played.
The demo opens at the player’s home, as revealed in the second trailer for Dragon Ball Xenoverse 3. The person who was playing the game chose to play as an Earthling named Senna. They leave the apartment as the person leading the presentation informed us that we can change our appearance at our home in-game. You see Future Trunks (Z) just chilling outside with a yellow name indicator. The yellow name could allude to this being a potential mentor, since in Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2, characters from the series populate the hub as mentor figures you can get close to and learn their move sets.
They make it outside to see Gamma 1 and Brett. Brett was one of the characters featured in the second trailer for the game, Brett appears to be a rival and friend to your player character. Gamma asks your character to go on a mission, and then they depart.
One thing from the first mission is made apparent. Your party is no longer limited to three main characters. You can now have a party of up to four characters take on missions. During the combat sections, one thing was very different: Super Attack skill usage. Senna was equipped with God Fist, Kaioken Assault, Kamehameha, and Energy Charge. When the player used a skill, instead of ki being used, a cooldown happened. The skill would go grey and had to fill up before being used again. Other skills could still be used; it’s just that one individual skill would not. You could reduce the time it took to get that skill to recharge by using Energy Charge. Energy charge still had its use with this system.
Ki Bar isn’t gone, though. Instead of a life bar, you have a single Ki bar. This Ki bar acts as a life force bar, which, to be honest, is more accurate to how it actually is in the series. Perfect guards would give you a buff that could give you an aura of regeneration. It would heal up your Ki bar slowly as long as you don’t take a hit.
The first part of the mission was a fight against a large force of enemies. Alongside the Ultimate skill, which was Super Kamehameha, two other buttons could be pressed. Holding the RB button would bring up your normal skills, and holding the LB would bring up the ultimate skill and the other two buttons. The first of the two buttons was the Soul Assist.
The Soul Assist was mapped to the Galick Gun. When the player used this Soul Assist, Vegeta from the Saiyan Saga would show up and help out with the attack. The last button was the Soul Switch.
Soul Switch made your character transform into another character. This character for the demo was Future Trunks (Z). Once transformed, the Ki bar would refill completely, and your skills would all change for a brief period of time. You were in the body of Trunks with his move set and his combat style. This is a good way to get players to play with characters besides their own original character. I also think it might be the band-aid for some of the complaints about other races than Saiyans in the game. I hope it isn’t the only response for those of us who want to make a viable Namekian build. This is a feature that was in Dragon Ball Breakers, so I guess there is some influence from that game, making it into Dragon Ball Xenoverse 3.
Then, after the fight, a boss fight occurred. Super Saiyan Broly from Dragon Ball Super showed up enraged.
The boss fight against Broly definitely felt inspired from the Raid bosses in Xenoverse 2. He has a normal skill set but at certain intervals he will launch large ki skills. The player needs to dodge, and get behind the ice barriers so they don’t get hit by the giant explosion of ki blasts. Then once it’s done, you can go back on the offensive.
Once the fight was done, they showed us a snippet of gameplay with the Saiyan fighter. They had more ki blast skills instead of melee skills. Though the Soul Switch area was changed to a Super Saiyan transformation skill. Once transformed a timer appears on top of the skill icon. The transformation button prompt also changed to a Super Saiyan 3 icon.
I’m guessing the timer keeps the transformation limited. Once the timer reaches 0, my guess is that the transformation ends. Since there’s no ki bar attached to the skill use, transformations need to be limited by something.
I don’t know since as soon as the player used the Super Saiyan 3 transformation the game snippet ended. We didn’t get to see what happens once the timer reaches 0.
One thing that I was a little disappointed by is the ally AI. They were not very aggressive or really tried going on the offensive. They were constantly dying to Broly, and with having another party member in tow, they focused on reviving the AI that would constantly die. It seems like the Ally AI was not improved from Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2. The visuals and the performance looked fantastic though. It isn’t a huge jump but the focus on speed does make a huge difference in gameplay. The demo player was doing a good job comboing into several super skills and unlike Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2, a large portion of them actually hit their target. I do think it’s due to the improved speed.
Dragon Ball Xenoverse 3 is currently slated to launch in 2027 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and PC via Steam.
