Champa, Jaco and Cheelai take over Sparking! ZERO as NEO’s final showcase turns to Dragon Ball Super

The strongest new fighter in the room is a God of Destruction. The strangest is a Galactic Patrolman who insists he is considerably more impressive than everyone around him believes. The most unexpected is someone who was never supposed to be a conventional martial artist in the first place. DRAGON BALL: Sparking! ZERO has released its Dragon Ball Super Character Showcase for Super Limit-Breaking NEO, putting Champa, Jaco and Cheelai under the spotlight as Bandai Namco completes its recent tour through the expansion’s enormous 33-character roster.

The October 9 trailer is not announcing another character pack. Super Limit-Breaking NEO has been available since July 30 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC, and the new showcase is designed to highlight what its Dragon Ball Super contingent actually brings to battle. That distinction matters because NEO is considerably larger than a normal roster DLC: it added four Episode Battles, Extra Battles, four completely new stages, extensive customisation options and Limit Breaker Journey, while a simultaneous free update introduced two mechanics capable of changing how every character in the game approaches combat.

Dragon Ball Super gets the most unusual trio in the entire expansion

Super Limit-Breaking NEO reaches across almost every major era of Dragon Ball, but its Super representatives stand apart because Champa, Jaco and Cheelai could barely be more different from one another. One sits beside Beerus in the divine hierarchy, another operates as a comedic law-enforcement character who nevertheless knows how to fight, and the third became important to Dragon Ball through her relationship with Broly rather than through martial arts.

That variety is exactly what makes the latest showcase interesting. A simpler expansion could have filled the remaining roster slots with increasingly powerful Saiyan transformations and called the job finished. Sparking! ZERO instead continues the Budokai Tenkaichi tradition of treating the Dragon Ball universe as a toy box, where recognisability, personality and the possibility of recreating strange matchups can matter almost as much as canonical combat strength.

Champa represents the obvious power fantasy. Jaco represents Dragon Ball’s long-running ability to alternate genuine danger with absurd comedy. Cheelai represents perhaps the purest expression of Sparking! ZERO’s philosophy: if a character is memorable enough, Spike Chunsoft will attempt to find a way to make them fight.

Champa finally gets the battle roster position his rivalry with Beerus demands

Of the three, Champa requires the least explanation as a playable fighter. The God of Destruction of Universe 6 is Beerus’s twin brother and was one of the central figures behind the tournament between Universes 6 and 7, the arc that dramatically expanded Dragon Ball Super’s cosmology beyond Goku and Vegeta’s home universe.

His presence immediately creates matchups Sparking! ZERO was missing. Beerus has been part of the roster since launch, as have many of the fighters associated with the Universe 6 storyline, but the deity responsible for assembling their side of the competition was conspicuously absent. NEO finally allows the sibling rivalry itself to become a playable battle instead of remaining something represented indirectly through existing characters.

The game gives Champa appropriately destructive techniques. His moveset includes Sphere of Destruction, God of Destruction’s Menace and Super Sphere of Destruction, leaning into the same divine destructive energy that defines his status while allowing his personality to remain distinct from Beerus. Sparking! ZERO has never attempted to make supposedly equivalent characters mechanically identical simply because their positions in the fiction are similar, and the animation work surrounding Champa’s attacks preserves his heavier, more impatient physicality.

That distinction is important. Champa is not simply “another Beerus.” His relationship with his brother has always combined genuine divine power with petty competition, food obsession and the kind of arguments that would be harmless if the people involved were not capable of destroying planets. Putting both characters in the same arena gives players exactly the kind of scenario the Sparking series has traditionally existed to enable.

Universe 6 now feels more complete

Champa also makes the existing Universe 6 roster more coherent. Sparking! ZERO already offered fighters including Hit, Cabba, Caulifla, Kale and Kefla, covering the assassins and Saiyans who eventually became some of Super’s most prominent additions. What was missing was the character who gives that universe its competitive relationship with Universe 7 in the first place.

The God of Destruction Champa arc fundamentally changed Dragon Ball’s scale. Beerus and Whis had already established that Earth existed inside a much larger divine structure, but the discovery of Universe 6 introduced counterpart worlds, another Saiyan civilisation and the Super Dragon Balls while laying groundwork for the Tournament of Power. Champa’s tournament becomes the point where the series begins using the multiverse as an active source of new fighters rather than distant mythology.

That makes his NEO inclusion historically useful as well as mechanically obvious. Players can now reconstruct a greater portion of that era without needing to substitute Beerus or another existing character into Champa’s role.

Jaco brings a completely different type of Dragon Ball fighter

Jaco may describe himself as an elite member of the Galactic Patrol, but Dragon Ball has always treated that claim with considerable flexibility. He is capable enough to overwhelm ordinary soldiers, agile enough to survive situations that would kill normal humans and equipped with advanced Galactic Patrol technology, yet his defining trait is frequently the enormous gap between his confidence and his willingness to confront anything genuinely terrifying.

That combination makes him almost purpose-built for a Budokai Tenkaichi roster.

Jaco originated in Akira Toriyama’s Jaco the Galactic Patrolman before being integrated more directly into Dragon Ball, becoming a recurring supporting character and participating in the confrontation with Frieza’s resurrected army. His connection with Bulma and the Brief family also places him unusually deep inside Dragon Ball continuity for a character whose personality initially feels like comic relief.

Sparking! ZERO translates that personality through attacks including Elite Beam, Elite Rush and Super Elite Combo. Even the naming is characterisation: Jaco cannot simply perform a rush attack because, naturally, it has to be an elite one. The game understands that faithfully adapting Dragon Ball is not only about reproducing the exact trajectory of an energy beam; it is about making the move list sound as though the character themselves would have named it.

Jaco highlights why power scaling has never been the point of Sparking

Putting Jaco beside Beerus, Ultra Instinct Goku, Jiren, Gogeta or Broly is absurd if the roster is judged purely through canonical strength. That is also one of the reasons these games are entertaining.

The Budokai Tenkaichi formula has historically allowed wildly unequal Dragon Ball characters to coexist, with team-building systems and character costs acknowledging power differences without requiring the roster to become a strict list of whoever happens to be strongest in the latest anime arc. Sparking! ZERO inherited that philosophy at launch and NEO pushes it much further.

Jaco can fight a God of Destruction because the game values the hypothetical matchup more than maintaining a flawless simulation of Dragon Ball’s hierarchy. Grandpa Gohan can meet Jiren. General Blue can challenge Broly. Chi-Chi can enter an arena with Super 17. The resulting imbalance is not always competitively elegant, but competitive symmetry was never the only purpose of this particular kind of Dragon Ball game.

Its other purpose is to answer the question, “What happens if I make these two fight?” Jaco is exactly the sort of character that keeps that question interesting.

Cheelai is the boldest interpretation of what counts as a fighter

Then there is Cheelai, arguably the most revealing character in the entire Dragon Ball Super showcase.

Cheelai became one of the breakout characters of Dragon Ball Super: Broly. She joins Frieza’s forces after getting into trouble with the Galactic Patrol, eventually encounters Broly and Paragus on Vampa and rapidly develops sympathy for Broly after recognising how brutally his father controls him. During the film’s climax, she uses the Dragon Balls to save Broly from Gogeta by wishing him back to Vampa.

None of that naturally describes a traditional fighting-game character.

Cheelai is armed and can defend herself, but she is not portrayed as another hidden martial arts prodigy capable of trading blows with Saiyans. NEO nevertheless gives her a complete playable implementation, with techniques including Energy Shot, Surprise Attack and Survival Attack. The design leans into speed, technology and opportunism rather than pretending she suddenly possesses the raw combat strength of the monsters surrounding her.

That is the correct solution. Making Cheelai play like a miniature Goku would betray the character, while excluding her permanently because she is not a tournament fighter would remove exactly the kind of roster oddity that made the old Tenkaichi games so memorable.

Cheelai expands the Dragon Ball Super Broly side of the roster without adding another transformation

Sparking! ZERO already has extensive representation for Dragon Ball Super: Broly, including Broly himself and the versions of Goku, Vegeta and Gogeta associated with that era. Cheelai approaches the film from the opposite direction. She is important precisely because she cannot overpower Broly.

Her role is humanising. She and Lemo become some of the first people to treat Broly as an individual rather than a weapon, and her decision to steal Paragus’s control device establishes where her loyalties are heading long before she ultimately uses Shenron to save him.

That makes her inclusion useful even if players never expect her to dominate ranked matches. Sparking! ZERO places enormous value on battle introductions, character interactions and recreating scenes that exist around the fights rather than only the final beam struggle. A character like Cheelai increases the number of relationships the game can acknowledge.

Putting her opposite Broly carries meaning that another transformation slot would not.

The showcase demonstrates NEO’s real roster philosophy

The three Super characters neatly illustrate what Super Limit-Breaking NEO was attempting across all 33 additions. The expansion is not primarily about moving the roster further forward chronologically. It is about filling gaps.

Original Dragon Ball received characters such as Nam, Eighter, General Blue, Mercenary Tao, Spike the Devil Man, Grandpa Gohan, Demon King Piccolo, tournament-era Goku and Tien, Chi-Chi and Ma Junior. Dragon Ball Z-related material reaches into characters including Supreme Kai, Mighty Mask, Zangya, Pikkon, Bardock’s Super Saiyan form, Fasha, Tora, Salza and Chilled. GT finally received important omissions including Vegeta, Trunks, Hell Fighter 17, Super 17 and Nuova Shenron.

Super contributes fewer obvious missing combatants because Sparking! ZERO’s base roster already covered that era heavily. Instead, NEO chooses three characters that expand different parts of its world: a missing deity, a recurring Galactic Patrol supporting fighter and one of Broly’s most recognisable non-Saiyan characters.

The result feels much closer to the philosophy of Budokai Tenkaichi 3, where the fascination of the roster came partly from discovering that characters nobody reasonably expected had somehow been made playable.

Thirty-three additions push an already enormous roster even further

Sparking! ZERO launched in 2024 with more than 180 playable characters and forms, already making roster size one of its defining characteristics. Subsequent Super Hero, DAIMA and Shallot content pushed that number beyond 200 before NEO arrived.

Adding another 33 at once is therefore unusual even by this franchise’s standards. Most fighting games would treat that number as close to an entire launch roster; Sparking! ZERO uses it for one expansion.

The distinction between “characters” and transformations remains relevant because the game counts different forms as separate playable roster entries. Vegeta (GT) and Super Saiyan Vegeta (GT), for example, occupy individual slots even though transformation links exist between forms. That methodology has always inflated Tenkaichi roster totals compared with fighters that contain every transformation inside one selection, but it also allows each form to receive its own statistics, abilities and presentation.

NEO embraces that structure rather than trying to hide it, mixing forms with completely independent newcomers to reach its 33-fighter total.

Limit Breaker Journey gives those roster additions somewhere new to go

The expansion would have been considerably less interesting if 33 fighters were its only meaningful addition. Limit Breaker Journey gives NEO a new single-player framework built specifically around taking one chosen character and developing them over repeated battles.

Players move through a map containing encounters and events, choosing opponents partly according to their displayed strength. Movement consumes stamina, which can affect the amount of health available at the start of battle, creating a modest risk-reward layer before the fighting begins. More difficult opponents award greater experience, while events can provide Battle Arts, training opportunities and other benefits.

Progression produces points that can be allocated across six statistics, letting a player gradually push the selected fighter toward a preferred style. The resulting customised character can subsequently be used outside the mode in player matches and offline battles.

For Champa, Jaco and Cheelai, that creates particularly strange possibilities. The canonical gulf separating the three can become less important when each is being deliberately developed according to the player’s preferred build.

NEO is increasingly about making your version of Dragon Ball

Producer Jun Furutani described deeper immersion in individual characters as one of the major objectives behind NEO. That explains why the DLC does not stop at roster expansion and Limit Breaker Journey. Bandai Namco also advertises more than 20 customisation additions, including costumes, costumes associated with alternative Super Attacks and separately equipable techniques.

The philosophy is important because Sparking! ZERO has always existed somewhere between a fighting game and a Dragon Ball sandbox. Its cinematic presentation and enormous roster encourage players to reconstruct canonical battles, while Custom Battle actively lets them create situations that never happened.

NEO pushes the second half harder. Training a favourite character, changing aspects of their moveset and selecting increasingly obscure fighters gives players greater control over which version of Dragon Ball they want the game to represent.

Cheelai defeating Champa would make absolutely no sense in the story. In Sparking! ZERO, making it happen is part of the product.

Sparking Boost changes the risk around the game’s strongest state

Some of NEO’s most important changes were actually distributed through the free update released alongside the expansion, meaning players do not need to purchase the DLC to access them.

Sparking! Boost extends the strategic possibilities of Sparking! Mode by allowing the player to consume a substantial amount of Skill Stock for a considerable temporary increase in attack power. The advantage comes with an explicit drawback: once the boosted state ends, the character suffers a temporary statistical penalty.

It effectively turns Sparking! Mode into a larger commitment. A player who activates the boost at the correct moment can create a devastating offensive window, particularly if the opponent is already under pressure. Activating it carelessly can leave the same player weakened after failing to finish the job.

That risk fits Dragon Ball unusually well. The franchise constantly uses transformations, techniques and sudden bursts of power that produce overwhelming short-term advantages while leaving fighters exhausted or vulnerable afterward.

Chain Blast gives team battles a more cinematic handoff

The second free mechanic, Chain Blast, is designed around team composition. After launching an opponent away, the attacking player can bring in a reserve ally and continue the sequence with a predetermined Blast technique.

The immediate appeal is spectacle. Dragon Ball frequently depicts fighters exchanging positions inside the same assault, and Chain Blast allows tag battles to reproduce that rhythm without forcing the first character to completely end their offence before the teammate enters.

Mechanically, it also increases the importance of understanding which follow-up each character performs because the triggered attack is predetermined rather than freely chosen. Team construction therefore affects not only which fighters are available after a switch but what kind of damage sequence can emerge from the handoff itself.

A lineup containing Champa, Jaco and Cheelai may be ridiculous from a narrative standpoint, but the new system gives that ridiculous lineup another way to function as an actual team.

Four new arenas make the expansion more useful for recreating specific eras

NEO also addresses one of Sparking! ZERO’s quieter launch limitations: despite its huge roster, the number of environments did not always match the number of famous battles players wanted to recreate.

The DLC adds Kami’s Palace, Kame House, Bitter Tundra and Stratosphere, with the latter offering Earth and Planet Vegeta contexts. Bandai Namco has specifically emphasised the destruction possible at Kami’s Palace, including the ability for fighting to tear through far more of the location than a static arena implementation would allow.

The free update supplements those DLC environments with three additional variations of existing stages, expanding the number of contexts available without placing every environmental change behind the paid expansion.

This matters more to Sparking! ZERO than it would to a conventional arena fighter because environmental authenticity is part of the fantasy. A technically identical battle feels different when Goku and Piccolo are destroying Kami’s Palace rather than fighting in a generic wasteland.

The Dragon Ball Super trailer is the last stop in a four-week showcase campaign

Bandai Namco has been revisiting NEO throughout September and October rather than treating its July release as the end of promotion. The publisher began a new sequence on September 18 with the Dragon Ball Character Showcase, followed by the Dragon Ball Z spotlight on September 25 and Dragon Ball GT on October 2.

Dragon Ball Super followed on October 9, completing the era-by-era presentation.

That cadence explains why the current trailer arrives more than two months after the DLC itself. It is essentially a post-launch roster campaign, giving each part of Dragon Ball enough space to demonstrate its additions instead of compressing all 33 fighters into one rapid montage.

The approach also makes sense for an expansion dominated by characters from different generations of the franchise. Somebody interested in original Dragon Ball may care primarily about Demon King Piccolo and tournament Goku, while GT fans have been waiting for Super 17 and Vegeta’s missing forms. The latest trailer gives Super fans the equivalent focused presentation.

The timing also coincides with Sparking! ZERO’s second anniversary

The Dragon Ball Super showcase arrived immediately before Sparking! ZERO’s second anniversary on October 11, and Bandai Namco used the same week to make clear that NEO is not the game’s final major update.

A newly announced Tower of Power mode is planned to challenge players with increasingly difficult opponents as they ascend through successive battles. Completing the tower will award Ki Aura customisation items, and Bandai says the mode will initially arrive as a solo experience before later team-focused content expands the concept.

The longer-term roadmap also includes additional free updates, more paid playable characters, SP Mission 100, SP Survival Mode and a future team battle mode. Bandai Namco describes the planned team system as allowing groups of up to five players, with each participant controlling one character while individual one-on-one fights determine the confrontation.

That is substantial evidence that NEO should be viewed as a new stage of Sparking! ZERO rather than the final expansion at the end of its support cycle.

Cross-play is coming, but considerably later than many players hoped

The anniversary roadmap also addresses one of the most persistent requests surrounding Sparking! ZERO: cross-platform play.

Bandai Namco now plans a limited cross-play beta after summer 2027 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and Steam. The publisher has not yet provided a final release date for full cross-play, and the test itself will initially be limited, so it would be premature to describe the feature as arriving across every platform next year.

Still, its inclusion on an official roadmap is significant. Sparking! ZERO’s multiplayer population has traditionally been divided by platform, something that becomes increasingly restrictive as a fighting game ages and its active player base becomes more concentrated.

A roster containing hundreds of characters is far more useful when finding someone to fight does not depend entirely on whether they bought the same box.

Nintendo players still have to wait for NEO

There is also an important platform caveat around the latest character showcase. DRAGON BALL: Sparking! ZERO itself is already available on Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2, but Super Limit-Breaking NEO is not yet available on either Nintendo platform.

Bandai Namco currently plans the DLC for Switch and Switch 2 in 2027, alongside the Nintendo versions of Mission 100 and Survival Mode. The exact date has not been announced.

The current trailer can therefore function differently depending on where somebody plays. For PlayStation, Xbox and PC users, it showcases fighters they can use immediately. For Nintendo players, it remains a preview of content that is still waiting on their platform roadmap.

Bandai Namco has explicitly warned that future content schedules will vary by platform, so parity should not be assumed at every stage of the 2026–2027 plan.

Cheelai may ultimately say more about NEO than Champa does

Champa is the fighter most obviously suited to the game. Jaco is the sort of unusual but capable character Budokai Tenkaichi has always enjoyed. Cheelai is the one who reveals how far Spike Chunsoft is prepared to stretch the definition of a playable Dragon Ball combatant.

That willingness matters because Sparking! ZERO was never going to struggle to find another powerful Saiyan. Dragon Ball now contains enough transformations, alternate timelines and movie variants that a developer could fill years of DLC without ever leaving the upper reaches of the power scale.

The harder and more interesting task is making the universe feel broad rather than merely strong.

NEO does that with elderly martial artists, forgotten tournament opponents, movie henchmen, deities, comic-relief characters, GT villains and someone whose most important contribution to a Dragon Ball battle was using a wish to make sure Broly escaped it alive.

That roster philosophy is messy, occasionally absurd and impossible to balance according to the fiction.

It is also extremely Budokai Tenkaichi.

Super Limit-Breaking NEO is less an expansion of power than an expansion of possibility

The latest showcase’s tagline promises intense rivalries and earth-shattering battles, and Champa can certainly provide both. But the more interesting achievement is that the same trailer can place him beside Jaco and Cheelai without treating either as a mistake.

That is where Sparking! ZERO remains different from a more conventional competitive fighter. Its huge roster is not valuable merely because the selection screen contains a large number. It matters because each additional character creates new interactions, team combinations, Custom Battle possibilities and increasingly ridiculous alternatives to Dragon Ball canon.

Super Limit-Breaking NEO understood that. Its 33 fighters do not form a coherent power tier or chronological chapter because coherence was never the objective. The expansion is about creating a broader sandbox and then giving players Limit Breaker Journey, new customisation, additional stages and mechanics with which to use it.

The Dragon Ball Super Character Showcase was released on October 9, 2026. Super Limit-Breaking NEO is available now for DRAGON BALL: Sparking! ZERO on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC, with Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2 versions planned for 2027.