Bleach DS

If you don’t know, this game is currently Japanese only, so don’t expect to be able to buy it at a local GameStop or EB Games. If you plan on buying it, prepare to shell out extra money for it, because of importing costs and crap.

Bleach DS is a fighting game made by Sega about the anime called Bleach. As of now from my current knowledge, the anime has yet to be licensed. That means if you want to know what this series is about, go download a torrent. Since I can’t read Japanese, I couldn’t really understand the story in the game, but it starts at the end of the second DVD of the show.

When you get to the main menu, you notice there is a crap load of options to use. The main game play options are the story mode, arcade, training, and multiplayer. First thing I tried was the story mode. Now remember I don’t know Japanese, so this was hard to handle. They first send you to the how to play level. Here, they show you what buttons do what, how to attack, how to dodge, how to jump, etc. After you complete the training stage, you are sent to level 1 to start fighting. Right here is when it gets confusing for me, because after level 2, it will skip around levels for a reason I have yet to grasp. One thing that is frustrating is when you think you are about to fight the final boss for your character (you start with Ichigo, but choose more later), they send you to level 2. Now you have to fight through the levels again, but sometimes finding a different level and/or adding another character for you to fight.

Controls are very easy to use. You have A, Y, and X to attack and B to strafe across the screen without taking damage. To jump, you press the up button on the control pad, which can get in the way when you try to run to someone and accidentally jump. If you press the L button, you can jump to a separate arena in the background. On the touch screen, you can have your cards which can raise your hit bar and does something to an enemy, or switch it to have a “easy to use” combo system. They give you a list of combos you can use without having to press the buttons. This makes the combo system really easy to use for people who can’t handle pressing 10 buttons to make a combo. But if you are like me, you can just button smash and you will eventually make use a combo.

Graphics look like they were ripped from an GBA game. They have the horribly but out lines around the pictures when someone is talking, and little animation when fighting. When the camera zooms out for a big fight, all the characters look like they were shrunk on photoshop. The details gets squished, lines disappear, and the overall character looks really messed up. The backgrounds at least looked pretty good. They have a good sue of coloring, detailing, and it isn’t distorted when the camera zooms out.

Audio in the game is pretty low quality. The attacks sound like they came out of a SNES game, and the yells characters give get old very fast. The soundtrack they used is pretty decent, using a punk song on the title animation, but very low quality sound. If you go to AOL and listen to a song that has the lowest quality setting, you will get what I mean. But don’t try to listen to the music when playing the game, because the sound effects will cover up the music. A plus is that you can mute sound effects or make the volume lower, so that solves that problem.

3 star(s) out of 5

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