Xenoverse 2 can look more or less as good as Sparking Zero with the assistance of a shader, but the stock look has characters looking like they're slick with white goo. You could also argue both games suffer from having some models that look great but others that look really bad. Sparking Zero has better combat, but Xenoverse 2 lets 3-8 characters fight at a time. For my money, I put 3-8 characters fighting at a time over most of Sparking's superior combat. I fear a lot of Sparking Zero is carried by the bigger maps, destruction physics, and admittedly beautiful particle FX.

CaCs are undercooked in base Xenoverse 2, but I would argue that if you're playing XV2 on a console in 2025, you're fucking up. You're accepting a console experience that even Skyrim and Fallout players don't put up with anymore because Bethesda baked a simplified, curated mod manager into their games. It doesn't require a powerful PC to run, either. So I'm not even really trying to compare Sparking to base Xenoverse 2 aside from brief highlights of its shortcomings. You really need to compare the PC versions, and Xenoverse 2 has a tremendous lead. A tremendous lead that is only going to get bigger when the next patcher and Revamp updates are released.