Bleach: Soul Resurreccion

Game Info

I’m not even going to pretend I know what’s going on in Bleach: Soul Resurreccion.  This is an unintelligible game to anyone but current Bleach fans, which I’m told is a japanimation cartoon of some note.  Since the last anime I watched was Samurai Pizza Cats, I’m completely out of my element here.  So, let’s take a deep breath together and see what we can do.

With Wikipedia wide open, Bleach: Soul Resurreccion is a Warriors Orochi-style beat-em-up where you mash on square for the two hours the Story mode takes.  As mentioned, this story mode is completely incomprehensible to anyone not already very familiar with the source material – and even then, some curveballs get thrown.  I actually had a fan of the anime sitting next to me while I played, and he couldn’t place a few of the characters.  It seems Aizen is a bad guy and he wants to invade the world from the netherworld, and you – as a variety of characters – have to stop him.  That’s about what I got from all this.

Playing the game is like playing any beat-em-up in this style.  Enemies fill the various corridors and open spaces, and you must hit square to attack them.  You can usually hit triangle for a ranged shot if you so desire, as well.  Linking these all together produces long combos that increase the amount of points you get to level up your characters at the end of the stage, which is essential for the later stages in Mission Mode – objective-based stages where you choose who you’ll be playing as.  After accumulating power you can go into a super mode, and then fire off a mega-attack that will usually kill whatever baddie you’re up against.

Added is a score attack mode, and planning out the perfect route through a stage to keep your multipier up and max out your score is the way to go here.  It’s all asynchronous though, even though these style of games are tailor-made for couch multiplayer.

This is a fine formula, and has basically worked for the two dozen or so iterations of Dynasty Warriors, Orochi, and Sengoku Basara games that have come out.  Unfortunately, Bleach gets hindered by a few hiccups in the formula.  Foremost, the backgrounds and settings of these battles are bland.  We’re either in the desert netherworld, populated by the occasional rock, or we’re flying above a city.  At one point, there’s a house.  And that’s it.  It’s disappointing to see such boring settings up against such well-drawn and animated characters.  Since the source material is a cartoon, the characters are already fairly well-drawn.  The faux-3D cell thing is getting to be a crowded graphical concept, but it looks really good here.  Enemies, even the masses of easy fodder, are all sharp-looking and well drawn.  Animation, effects, and the special attacks are all interesting to watch and fairly varied, what with the 20ish characters not sharing movesets.  It’s a shame the same attention to detail wasn’t present for the backgrounds.

Unfortunately, the sound is another misfire as well.  We’re all used to the heavy guitar riffs and thrash metal that accompanies beat-em-ups from Japan, and Bleach is no exception.  The voice acting is all well-done, and there’s an option for subs or dubs, whichever you prefer (the debate rages on).  But it’s all so quiet, and overlayed during the action bits.  While the combat rages on, with battle shouts and weapon sounds and guitars wailing, the various characters will also wax poetic on their situations, often having conversations with others, unseen on the battlefield.  There’s just so much going on with the audio that it all gets severely muddled together.

Technical issues aside, Bleach: Soul Resurreccion isn’t a terrible game.  It’s an acceptable entry into the genre, and a must-have for Bleach fans.  For everyone else, it’s an utterly incomprehensible mess of a plot wrapped around a beat-em-up game, but at least the graphics and animations are pretty.