Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero - Super Limit-Breaking NEO Review (PS5)

Super Limit-Breaking NEO, a fairly substantial expansion for Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero, feels like what would happen if a publisher decided to scrap its DLC roadmap and just throw everything it had lined up into one big bundle.

It's an erratic mix of characters, stages, and new ways to play. There's no real rhyme or reason to its roster additions, for example; there are a whopping 33 new characters in all, spread across the original Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball GT, Dragon Ball Super, and a few of the movies.

It's clear that the developer's tried to plug some of the gaps in the existing lineup, which is understandable — but it leaves the newcomers feeling a bit like bottom-of-the-barrel picks who weren't deemed popular enough to be in the base roster, or their own DLC packs.

Still, you won't see me complaining about being able to play as Devilman or Super Saiyan Bardock.

The new stages are quite nice as well, and a bunch of alternate costumes for various characters have been added. Purely in terms of fleshing out what was an already fit-to-burst fighter, NEO is a meaty — but not essential — DLC.

But the thing is, if you're not here for the new characters, you're relying on the expansion's Limit Breaker Journey mode to provide value — and it's just not as good as it should be.

This is a new single player mode where you can increase the power of your favourite characters by taking them on a randomised adventure. You choose events or battles from a world map, and you gain experience and skill points for each fight that you win.

You then use those points to bolster your character's stats, with the goal being to reach absurd levels of power. You can also take these beefed-up characters into casual online matches, or other single player options, which is an interesting wrinkle.

The problem is that Limit Breaker Journey is plagued by crazy difficulty spikes — and if you're defeated, you lose any temporary items or abilities from your run, and in roguelike-inspired fashion, you need to start over.

There just isn't a satisfying rhythm to it, even though there's a lot of fun to be had with the mode's random structure. Having set difficulty levels for your opponent's fighting ability — like in the game's other single player modes — would probably solve a lot of the issues.

But as it stands, it feels like you're rolling the dice on every enemy encounter, regardless of their indicated power level on the map. Sometimes the CPU is borderline brain-dead, other times, it's utterly unforgiving.

It's a shame the mode's so up and down, because if you do end up on a lucky run, its potential is obvious.

This could, and maybe should, have been a proper RPG-style mode, where you gradually build your chosen character across an endless series of battles — but the roguelike approach to failure sucks the fun away more often than not.