Dragon Ball: The Breakers

Dragon Ball: The Breakers is an asymmetric online multiplayer game developed by Dimps, set within the same universe as the Dragon Ball Xenoverse series. The game casts one player as the Raider, a powerful villain drawn from Dragon Ball history who hunts down the remaining players throughout the match, and assigns the remaining players the role of Survivors, ordinary civilians who must evade, cooperate, and ultimately escape the Raider before being eliminated. The asymmetric structure creates fundamentally different experiences for the two sides: the Raider grows stronger as the match progresses and eliminations accumulate, while Survivors must coordinate their actions, gather resources, and activate a large time machine to secure their escape from the Temporal Seam environment.

Survivors have access to a range of tools and abilities to aid their escape, including Super Souls that temporarily grant them the combat powers of iconic Dragon Ball Z heroes, allowing a civilian character to briefly fight back against the Raider using familiar techniques. The game rewards communication and coordination among the Survivor team, as solo play is generally insufficient against an experienced Raider. The Raider's power progression during a match, growing from a weaker initial state to a fully powered final form as they eliminate Survivors and complete objectives, mirrors the escalating power dynamic of the game's villain roster, which includes Frieza, Cell, Majin Buu, Beerus, and Broly as selectable Raider characters.

Custom Survivor characters can be created using an Earthling Male or Earthling Female base, giving players a personalized presence in the game's world separate from the named cast of Dragon Ball characters. A roster of named Survivor characters also exists, drawn from across the Dragon Ball franchise and organized into seasonal unlocks, with characters such as Youth Bulma, Oolong, and Farmer among the first season's options.

The narrative premise of The Breakers centers on seven ordinary people trapped in a Temporal Seam, a pocket dimension created by a disturbance in time that strands them alongside a Raider from another timeline. The Survivors must work together to activate an escape mechanism, the large-scale time machine, while the Raider attempts to eliminate them before they can succeed. This setup draws directly from the time-travel and timeline disruption themes established in the Xenoverse series, providing a lore-consistent framework that connects both games within the same fictional universe without requiring players to have played either Xenoverse title to understand the premise.

A formal crossover event with Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 reinforced the shared universe connection through an in-game DLC update, version 1.18.01, which introduced a Breakers Oolong character as an NPC in Xenoverse 2's Conton City hub. This Oolong acts as a bridge between the two games, providing players with an in-fiction acknowledgment of the events of The Breakers within the Xenoverse world. The crossover serves as both a narrative tie and a marketing connection, encouraging players of one game to be aware of the other's content.

Dragon Ball: The Breakers occupies a distinctive niche within the Dragon Ball gaming portfolio as the franchise's first dedicated asymmetric survival multiplayer title. The design draws clear influence from the asymmetric horror game genre popularized by titles such as Dead by Daylight, translating that format into the Dragon Ball universe by substituting monsters with iconic franchise villains and survivors with ordinary Dragon Ball world civilians. This genre translation gave the game a unique identity within the franchise's library while drawing interest from players familiar with asymmetric multiplayer design.

Developed by Dimps, who are also responsible for the Xenoverse series, The Breakers benefits from a development team with deep Dragon Ball game experience and an established connection to the franchise's lore and visual language. The Xenoverse universe setting allowed the game to inherit the time-travel and Temporal Seam concepts without requiring new worldbuilding, providing a ready-made narrative container for its premise. The game's position as an online multiplayer title dependent on an active player population represents both its greatest strength and its primary ongoing challenge, as the health of the matchmaking pool directly determines the quality of the player experience.