Dragon Ball Xenoverse 3 has you squad up to take on Broly

At Summer Game Fest Play Days, we had a chance to sit in on a hands-off presentation for Dragon Ball Xenoverse 3, the newest Dragon Ball title recently announced at the Dragon Ball Games Battle Hour this past April.

While our theater presentation was a relatively brief 20-minute hands-off gameplay demo, it acted as our first real look into the newest Xenoverse title, nearly a decade after the release of its predecessor.

We were soon acquainted with the two default player-created characters introduced for Xenoverse 3, which include an Earthling female character and a Saiyan male character, who have seemingly been given the names Jane 1000 and John 1000 from the Dragon Ball fandom. In our presentation, Bandai Namco introduced these characters as Sen and Nate, respectively. These two characters are a part of what is called the Great Saiyaman Squad, who seem to act as a superpowered crime-fighting force tasked to defend West City in AGE 1000.

AGE 1000 is the setting of Xenoverse 3, and one of the main concepts of the game is supposedly the concept of 'connection'. This could mean the connection between you, the player, to the other new characters and the original familiar Dragon Ball characters. Our presenter noted, as seen in the announcement trailer, that Bulma is here too, although the reason why will be detailed later.

After choosing our character, we started in the player's apartment room, which was a mess at the moment. The Bandai Namco presenter told us this will act as your home base, and players will be able to customize their character and fix up their room as you progress through the game's story. 

As we left the room and headed towards the mission selection, we were shown that Dragon Ball characters, such as "Vegeta (Saiyan Arc)" would appear in the game world as interactable NPCs, but the demonstration skipped over these for now.

We then joined a mission to defeat enemies in a snow environment, teaming up with three other players. Some of the playable races we saw included Human, Saiyans, Buu-type, and Frieza-type races.

According to Bandai Namco, Xenoverse 3 wants to offer a wider variety of battle situations to make full use of your four-character squad. They also want to give players more freedom to adapt and customize their fighting style, depending on the mission and the mission situation that's on hand.

In the mission itself, combat gameplay seemed broadly similar to previous Xenoverse titles or Dragon Ball Sparking Zero, in which you can fly, you can boost, you can blast, and you can also have a combination of different light and heavy attacks. You can also guard, of course, and performing Perfect Guards can be used to regain a bit of ki quickly.

In our demo, Sen was equipped with 4 special attacks, activated with R2 + a face button: Super God Fist, Kamahameha, Kaioken Assault, and Energy Charge. Her Ultimate attack was Super Kamehameha, which was used to wipe out an entire squad of enemies at once.

We were told that all of these abilities are customizable, alongside other, more passive traits, such that you can build your playable character how you'd like to.

One of the abilities at your disposal is called 'Soul Assist', which calls upon the power of a Dragon Ball Z character. In our presentation, we saw Vegeta jumping in to perform his Galick Gun. As with other battle techniques, this can be customized by the player.

The demo ended with a squad battle against Broly. Specifically, "Broly (Super), SS Full Power". It was here that the game felt more along of the lines of a co-operative RPG (like Monster Hunter, or perhaps Granblue Fantasy: Relink). There are even certain attacks that force you to use the environment to avoid taking damage - in this case, hiding behind icicles when Broly goes on ki rampages.

As a final trump card, you can perform an action called a 'Soul Switch', which will actually transform your player character into a Dragon Ball character. For our demo, Sen transformed into Future Trunks, able to use all his abilities for 40 seconds. Our presenter was even able to use Trunk's Ultimate Heat Dome Attack, before changing back to normal.

We ended our demo seeing a little bit of Saiyan gameplay with Nate, the other player character protagonist. As expected, he can go Super Saiyan using an awakening ability, and we were even shown that he can go beyond that, but our hands-on teaser ended there.

The demonstration we saw at Summer Game Fest was only a very small part of a game that will likely see updates for years to come. Dragon Ball Xenoverse 3 is set to release in 2027 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC (Steam).