An oftentimes downright entertaining fighting game which is nevertheless hard to recommend to non-Bleach fans.
• The best fighting game on the DS system
• Huge character roster
• Great sound effects
• Very cool story mode
Hollows:
• Saying it's the best fighting game on the DS system is like saying something is the best Halo title on the PlayStation. There's just not much competition
• A lot of the characters suck
• No command list makes it hard to learn combos
• Spirit cards are gimmicky
Yeah, I know, crummy pros/cons puns. You know what? I don't care.
This is one of those games that ended up hard to review conventionally. When I bought it, I got it really cheap at a GameStop sale and had read one review, mostly snagging it because of recently having become intrigued with the anime it's based off of. Bleach, created by a guy named Kubo Tite, is extremely popular and has run for almost 250 episodes. It's basically the epitome of shonen (for boys) anime, complete with horrible plot-breaking filler, cheesy dialogue, and characters who could deserve their own psychiatric hospitals. After episode 70 it gets pretty awful and I gave up on it, preferring to follow the manga instead.
Bleach-the-anime aside, how does Bleach-the-game stand up? This is the second Bleach fighting game on the Nintendo DS, and like its predecessor "Blade of Fate" it's a fighting game in the vein of Street Fighter or Tekken. The D-pad is used to move your character around on a 2-D plane whilst dodging your enemy attacks and striking at them using a combination of three buttons – light attack, medium, and heavy. Another button is dedicated to the Flash Step or 'shunpo', the special move Bleach characters use to quickly move short distances. It's a lot like the teleport moves in Dragon Ball games, and has the same function, drawing from your fighter's spirit energy (read: Flash Step ammo) reserves. In addition to spirit energy which recharges quickly over time, you'll have to manage your spirit pressure or 'reiatsu' (read: special attack ammo). When hitting or being hit, it slowly fills a maximum of three smaller bars. The game's most powerful attacks then consume one, two, or all bars to work. There are also two planes of battle; front and back, which makes four-player fights much less crazy. Not the most complicated of things, but good to have when you need to quickly get away from your opponent.
Moving is a big part of the game, as you can't simply wedge your enemy in a corner and slam heavy attacks in their face. For some weird reason, your fighter slides backwards with every hit as though trying out their Michael Jackson moonwalk impression, so simply hammering one attack over and over doesn't work at all. You'll just move out of range after one hit unless you merge the strike into a combo. Sounds pretty tactical and awesome, right? Unfortunately, the combos aren't listed in the game. The super-strikes are, but they all have shortcuts that are easy to tap on the DS touch screen with your thumb, and thus there's almost no reason to have them listed. For a die-hard fighting game fan, the system should be easier to figure out, but for a more casual fighting game player it's just overwhelming. I found myself frustrated several times as I tried to invent combos and kept moon-walking backwards with each strike as though trying to disprove Newton's laws of motion. Eventually I managed to figure out some great little four- or five-hit moves, but could never fit in a sixth. The system doesn't make itself conducive to learning.
Thankfully, you don't need to learn epic combos to succeed in single-player. You just have to not suck.
Single-player mode consists of some standard survival, time attack, and arcade modes, but the real attraction is the story mode. It has some dull plot about Soul Society and the Soul Reapers/'Shinigami' (read: good guys) being invaded by Hollows (read: bad guys), but the reason to play story mode is for all the random awesomeness in between. The game follows a sort of path, with fights along the way and branching paths that can only be reached on multiple playthroughs. I'm not big on multiple playthroughs, but I managed about a dozen of them for this game in order to get 100% on everything on all three difficulty levels.
You see, not many of the fights are the same. Some are standard one-on-one, others are four-on-one, some involve an AI partner who's almost always useless unless you're on Hard difficulty, and yet others have respawning enemies who don't stop until you've killed 20 or 30 or however many you need to in order to win. The one-on-one battles are the best of them all, though the four-on-one's are pretty good as well. Probably the worst are the respawning enemy ones, since they're extremely unfair, pitting you against obnoxious minions with low health who simply swarm all over you until you die. Against them, spamming the 'heavy' button tends to be the only option. The last of the four acts in the game, Act D, was particularly guilty of this, and was my least favorite as a result, especially since it had none of the weird minigames the first three acts delighted in.
Dark Souls has minigames. Yes. Except they're all played in the game engine, so they all work really well and hone your skills for the main game. In one, the characters Ikkaku and Yachiru get into a fight and upset a dumpling stand, leaving Ichigo (you) to catch all the dumplings before they fall on the ground. During a food eating contest you must collect more food than your opponent, while free to attack and stun each other. My absolute favorite was a weird quiz game; in which you had to choose one side of the screen or the other to stand on in order to answer true/false trivia questions about the show, all whilst fighting off the other 3 AI goons who try to mess you up. It's great fun, though the trivia could be a little tricky at first for people not intimately familiar with the ranks Hisagi Shuuhei and Kotetsu Kiyone occupy (Lieutenant of Squad 7 and Third Seat of Squad 13 respectively, oh dear god I am a nerd). I had no idea who they were when I played, but I managed to figure it out despite not really knowing who most of Bleach's million zillion characters were at the time.
Bleach's massive cast is reflected in the playable character roster. Your mainstay Ichigo is actually one of the very best in the bunch, as he's the main character. Unfortunately, a lot of the others don't fare as well. Sado Yasutora, Inoue Orihime, and Ishida Uryu; the other main human characters, are all nearly useless. A good third of the entire roster should never be used, including the main villains and a pile of joke characters. More painful are the inclusions of some characters who would otherwise be awesome, such as quick-and-tiny Kon and underrated Arisawa Tatsuki, who are given lame gimmicks to make them unable to compete. Then again, a stuffed animal and a normal girl fighting a bunch of sword-wielding magical spirit warriors probably wouldn't have a chance anyway.
The characters who are good are very good though, and have a lot of depth to their move-sets. If trying to puzzle out how they work isn't enough, you can also customize sets of 'spirit' cards which act as power-ups to use from the touch screen. These vary from buffs like improved speed or attack power, to action cards that may stop your opponent from swapping planes or prevent combos. Yet others restore health. Tending towards the gimmicky side, spirit cards really only become useful during the crazy minigames. They can be shut off in all modes except story, so they never unbalance the game.
More useful than spirit cards are reiju crystals, which provide passive buffs that are less powerful than card buffs, but are permanent. They're good for augmenting characters with particularly fatal flaws (Like the big wolf/fox thing Komamura Sajin, who's too slow to even compete without speed reiju). It's nice to be able to customize characters to a degree, but even better would be a system like the Capsules in Dragon Ball Z: Budokai 3 (a game you must play if you know anything of the subject matter and own a PS2).
My biggest problem with Bleach: Dark Souls is just how tired it got near the final third of the game. As the story is pretty bare-bones like in most fighting games, the final missions leaned too heavily on it instead of just being fun. Going up against three hyper-powerful high-HP Menos Grande enemies in the final battles is just not at all entertaining as they constantly unleash their weird sneak attacks and teleport around the screen. It's almost as if developer Treasure didn't factor in how utterly ludicrously unfair this is. Trying to block two screen-covering Cero blasts while being unable to jump to a differing plane because another Menos is Cero-ing that one becomes an exercise in frustration. Without the last part of the game, Dark Souls would earn another half-star.
It loses another star for the lackluster spirit card system and the irritating lack of a moves list. I really enjoyed Bleach: Dark Souls when I played it, but I don't see myself going back to it time and time again like I did with Soul Calibur and Super Smash Bros. Melee. Without a doubt it's the very best fighting game on the DS system, and even quite welcoming to those who aren't intimately familiar with the differences between reishi and reiatsu and reiryoku (much more so than the oft-incomprehensible Dragon Ball games). If you consider yourself a big Bleach fan it's an absolute must-buy. If not, weigh your options. A fighting game fan with no superior platform should certainly consider it, as should somebody who remembers how to pull off moves in Street Fighter II without the help of a command list. For those of us who just want to casually whack somebody in the face with a giant sword or staff, it's not really worth it. Dark Souls is a good game, and one which I really enjoyed, but not everybody will agree with me on that.