Along with Bleach: The Blade of Fate for the Nintendo DS, Sega has taken its first attempt at bringing the popular Bleach anime series to the western world. As we’ve seen with Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 2, the Wii can offer a whole new perspective to the anime fighter with endless options for innovative control schemes. Now, it’s Bleach’s turn to cash in, but can we expect anything more than your typical generic anime-based title?
Single Axis Action
One of the first things you’ll notice is that Shattered Blade offers 3D arenas with the ability to easily run or dash in any direction using the analog stick on the nunchuck. This is always a welcome addition to any 3D fighting game, but unfortunately, most of the action in Bleach takes place on a single axis. There’s no efficient way to sidestep, other than to dash to the side of your enemy. This rarely offers any tactical advantage however; you’ll eventually feel forced back onto the same axis as your opponent, whether you want to be there or not.
After noticing that the sidestepping game in Bleach isn’t quite up to par, I was hoping that the high flying action of the anime would translate well to a Wii fighter. The problem with this is that there’s no jump button. That’s right, there is no possible way to jump in Bleach unless a special move makes the character jump to perform it.
I do realize that jumping is not an integral part of 3D fighting, as it is in 2D fighting, but generally the option is there.
Pitfall Harry has been jumping since 1982. Especially given the high-flying nature of the source material, the inclusion of jump would have given Shattered Blade some much needed depth. Overall, the movement in Bleach is incredibility shallow. The Z axis is irrelevant and the Y axis is nonexistent; that’s not getting off to a good start. The only saving factor could have been a deep and creative combat system.
Everybody Loves to Waggle
The attack controls in Bleach: Shattered Blade have a simple design. You chop, slash, or stab your Wii-mote to make your character hack away at your opponent. If you hold A you’ll execute an unblockable critical attack; if you hold B you’ll throw out a special attack. Attacks of similar nature will cancel each other out or sometimes initiate a paper, rock, scissors-like mini game to determine which character gets to dish out the damage.
While this control scheme seems like it might be fun and intuitive, it’s poorly executed. The normal slashes have no real variation; an upwards slash barely differs from forward stab. Critical attacks always bypass block and can easily be exploited. I actually spent a great deal of time trying to figure out if there was some sort of defensive maneuver that could deflect a critical hit. There isn’t. It’s easy to be cheap in Shattered Blade. Remember that kid who psycho crushed his way back and forth as M. Bison at the arcades in the 90’s? Remember how sweet it felt to beat him after you learned the mechanics of Street Fighter II? That won’t happen in Bleach – there’s no way to conquer cheapness with skill, and that’s a surefire way to detect a poorly designed game.
Some of the special attacks are slightly inventive and represent moves from the anime, but for the most part the specials consist of the character executing stronger, yet still generic, attacks while they are dashing, glowing, and shouting. In fact, if Shattered Blade is good at one thing, it’s implementing a lot of incoherent dashing, glowing, and shouting.
It almost seems like there’s “something to get” before you can fully appreciate the combat system. After waiting for that spark to ignite or for that light bulb to appear above my head for about four to five hours, I can assure you that there is absolutely nothing to get. The combat in Bleach is repetitive and disjointed. There’s not a whole lot of skill involved either; it’s easy to win by waggling your Wii-mote like there’s no tomorrow and make use of the ridiculously cheap critical swipes. Trying to control your characters’ attacks in Bleach is like trying to control a bicycle in dream where you simply can’t control the bicycle because the uncontrollable nature of that particular dream.
My Battle Cry?
Bleach fans will be happy to hear that Shattered Blade has a huge cast of characters. This game includes almost every single character you could possibly want to play as (even a completely original character), along with interesting alternate costumes to unlock. Even characters that haven’t been featured in the English dub yet are in the game. All of the character designs and attacks are loyal to the anime. There is enough variation in the special moves and criticals between characters, but the fact every character is played exactly the same detracts from the depth of the fighting. This does add to the user-friendliness of Shattered Blade, but won’t suffice for gamers looking for a true fighting game experience.
The super-powered Bankai transformations are present as well, which can be performed by a simple wag of the nunchuck after your meter is filled. In fact, pulling off a Bankai is way too easy; more stringent requirements or more complex button combinations would have balanced things out. The transformation animations are entertaining the first couple of times, but unfortunately there’s no way to skip them.
Battles can be so short sometimes that you won’t even need to unleash your Bankai, and when you finally do, it’s just more of the same. Every character has an attack while in their super-powered state has a “cut-scene move.” Basically, it’s a simple slash or cut, and if it connects the battle stops, carnage ensues, battle cries are heard, and massive damage is dealt. While cut-scene moves are sometimes nice to look at, they interrupt the flow of combat and aren’t very creative at all. It’s all fan service with no redeeming gameplay qualities.
In case your love for the Bleach anime is so great that it automatically overrides the serious gameplay issues, you’ll have a lot of battling ahead of you, no matter how incoherent it might be. Being a huge fan of the show myself, I was hoping to get some sort of enjoyment out of this package. Unfortunately, the episode mode makes very little sense in the grand scheme of the Bleach storyline. It seems like the developers took a few keywords from the anime and used them to give the characters a good excuse to beat each other up. Aside from this shallow story mode, there’s not much else here other than an arcade mode and your standard versus mode.