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Those of you who have seen the anime or read the manga up until now are probably well acquainted with the story and the characters, and know that fighting is mainly what it’s about. The Gamecube rendition lets you play most of the big fights in what they call the scenario mode. Here you’ll find three scenarios that begin by telling the story from Ichigo and his friends’ point of view, then the tables will be turned and you’ll play as two of the ‘bad’ characters.
The story ends at around episode 61-62, so while it leaves out some amazingly big plot-twists it’s quite up to date, and should therefore be interesting for fans of the show.
Besides the scenario mode, which should last you a few hours, you have the ‘single’ mode where you choose a character and fight all of the ordinary opponents. Next is the match mode where you play as player vs. player, player vs. CPU, or CPU vs. CPU. Finally you have a nice tutorial/practice mode, and the 13 Bankyoubu mode, which is yet another good way of unlocking more of the many cool secrets you can find.
So how are the actual fighting mechanics? Honestly, they’re not too bad. There are about 15 characters initially and 25 total, when all have been unlocked. Most of them are armed with some kind of weapon, but they’re usually fairly well-balanced as to the number of opponents you can steamroll and the ones that’ll give you more of a challenge. In some of the modes the characters are also assigned difficulty ratings, though in my opinion they’re debatable.
As you fight your opponents a bar builds up at the bottom left of the screen. This denotes the ‘fuel’ for your special attacks, which come in a few flavors. R+A / R+X (A is the normal and X is the harder attack) will launch the standard special attacks. These tend to do a fair bit of damage, and normally have different ranges and uses.
R+Y is the character’s signature attack, and these do a great amount of damage—albeit after forcing you to watch an animated sequence that lasts perhaps ten seconds or so. This attack uses a great big chunk of the bottom left bar, but then again it can be recharged by holding L+R; quite useful when you’ve knocked your opponent down and don’t feel like closing in for the extra damage.
In addition to these you have a few more attacks that turn the screen black and white, and slows down time greatly for your opponent—an excellent time to launch a combo attack or another attack that could easily be blocked otherwise.
Bleach’s graphics are quite good. All of the characters are very nicely modeled and cel-shaded, and move around quite smoothly. The backgrounds aren’t phenomenal but you can easily recognize them from the show, and they’re not really bad, just a bit dull and lifeless. You cannot interact with the backgrounds in any way either; you just play ordinary and fairly short fights.
In between every fight in the scenario mode you have story elements where the various characters interact with each other. You can’t really understand much of it without knowing Japanese, so eventually I found myself just skipping through them quickly. Technically they’re not that great either—just still images with the standard cheap animation tricks to simulate motion and action. It’s something you just accept though, while laughing at the occasionally hilarious ‘Engrish’ phrase.
As a Japanese import game it’s not too hard to play and appreciate. The main menu text is in English, but the sub-menus are in Japanese; but the gameplay isn’t too complex so you should be able to discover most of the attacks and gameplay elements fast.
The audio has just about everything you could wish for, considering it’s an import title and those that’ll buy it have probably watched most of Bleach up until this point. All of the voice talents from the show have lent their voices to the game, and they sound as passionate as you could hope, which I guess is what matters for us foreigners. It would’ve been nice if there were more ways of playing with your friends though.
Bleach isn’t a game you’re likely to buy instead of the big blockbuster fighter titles. It’s a game for Bleach fans, and there’s starting to be a lot of us. You will of course need a Freeloader disc or other additional means to play this import title, but if you do pick it up you’ll find a fun game that’ll let you recreate most of the more or less epic battles. Sure, most of them never reach the same legendary proportions, but still.
In many ways it feels like it has what every fighting game should have, but not that much more. Most of all, it has a presentation that anime fans should enjoy, probably much more so than, I assume, everyone else.
Thanks to Lik-Sang.com for providing us with the review copy.
