Bleach: Soul Resurrección essentially retells the now concluded Hueco Mundo/Arrancar saga of the series. If you’re unfamiliar with the story and wish to catch up on your own, then you may want to skip the next paragraph.
The game follows the events where Aizen has escaped Soul Society and is now on the verge of building his own army of entities known as the Arrancar. In the meantime, one of the main characters, Orihime, gets kidnapped by one of the Arrancar and gets taken into their world: Hueco Mundo. Bleach protagonist, Ichigo, and his friends break into this world to take on their new adversary and to rescue Orihime. The game will feature several characters and events taken straight from the manga/anime, such as the battles with 'Espada' like Grimmjow. It follows the main cannon quite accurately, giving fans a chance to play through the events and memorable battles. The build we played was essentially the near complete version, and will like be close to the retail build that everyone is going to play in September. It opened up with a cool and dramatic animated intro complete with a nice instrumental theme song based on the 13th Bleach anime intro song. We then got into the ‘first episode’ of the game, taking control of Ichigo and starting off in the grey and barren Hueco Mundo desert.
Chaos in Mundo.
The first thing that we noticed was that the game looks really nice as it has some really cool anime style visuals and the animations. The textures and overall look is quite vibrant and full of eye candy, with plenty of cool particle effects and zany animations. It has a similar visual tone to cel-shaded video games, and we were pretty happy with the graphics. While Hueco Mundo is essentially grey and barren, the enemies and characters showed a lot of colour, detail and personality. The environments are destructible in this game, allowing you to send your foe crashing through pillars and stones, thus allowing you to recreate great moments in the anime in accurate detail, such as the explosive battle between Ichigo and Grimmjow.
While previously released Bleach titles on Nintendo consoles were usually fighting games, Bleach: Soul Resurrection instead is a full-fledged 3rd person action adventure title with linear progression, various enemies to battle and big boss battles. The game is set to feature several playable characters, each having their own set of episodes and story arcs. The build allowed us to take Ichigo, Rukia and the one and only fighting machine, Kenpachi, for a spin. Each character offered a different playing style complete with their trademark signature moves, and we quite enjoyed using all three of them.
Hyper active anime destruction!
The core combat system is a lot of fun, offering three attack buttons to help dish out a variety of cool combos and finishing moves. It also allows you to attack mid-air and dash around, and perform the ‘flash step’ technique, which comes really useful against big and powerful foes. Each character can also trigger a state that powers up their strikes for a limited time, during which they can perform their powerful super desperation attack that deals immense damage to everything that falls in its path. Fans of the anime will recognise all these powers and attacks, and have a blast dishing them out in the most dramatic fashion. A good example being Kenpachi’s ultimate attack, a jacked up Kendo strike that he used in his fight against Noitra during the arc.
Bleach: Soul Resurrección is set to arrive here in September 2011, and will come bundled with DVD featuring the very first episode of the anime series. While video game adaptations of anime franchises tend to be mediocre at best, the trend is improving a little with games like Afro Samurai and the Bleach fighting games on the Nintendo DS. Bleach: Soul Resurrección, from our brief experience, looks like is going to be one of the better ones. Fans will want to keep an eye on this fun action adventure romp.
Loading...
