I've been watching Phil's clips for playing Sparking Zero. He fucking sucks at the game. Yeah, the tutorial fucking sucks and hides a shit ton of mechanics from you. But Phil is just next level
A good strategy to use is to stay to sparking mode as much as possible since you can mass hit string combos, then when you knock your enemy away, follow up with an ult. Phil uses his shitty beam abilities when he does this. I also noticed that Phil isn't managing his resources well (a common problem he has in games). The game doesn't cover it well, but the blue bar is used to access sparking mode and the directional specials use multiple blue bars (hence why they're greyed out). Took me to the Goku Black arc to figure that out. But even then, you can figure out that your yellow bar is important to keep, but Phil never tries to use distance as a way to fill it.