MashButtons reviews Bleach: Soul Resurreccion

NIS America has just released the recent Bleach title, Soul Resurreccion for the PlayStation 3. Instead of a fighting title we have see on the portable devices, this time around is an action hack and slash, reenacting key experiences from the anime series, fighting off the army of Arrancars and eventually playing as some of the enemy Arrancar. Playable in Soul Resurreccion are 21 characters from the Bleach anime series. Aside from the main story mode, there are additional gameplay modes such as mission mode and soul attack mode. The character leveling system makes character growth customizable to your liking with a "map" to choose abilities and statistic upgrades to your liking. Now that the standard features and background are out of the way it is time for the review.

To preface, I have not seen any of the Bleach series, so going into the game, I was unfamiliar with the characters and story. This didn't hurt my experience, the fast gameplay and cel-shaded graphics being crisp and beautiful, may have made up for my lack of knowledge to the show's background. The closest game in which I could compare it to in regards to action and gameplay would be Dynasty Warriors, but the missions were shorter in the story mode, with each missions lasting about ten to fifteen minutes. What I thought added a lot of depth to the games was the leveling system in which uses soul points to unlock spots on a character map to add new abilities and level up character defense, attack, and hit points. Like I said, it is similar to Dynasty Warriors in regards to gameplay, so it is fast, fluid action and combos to wipe out mass amounts of enemies at any given time, but I also liked the boss fights and the variety of enemies and environments over the later.

Because I have not seen any of the Bleach episodes, I did feel a bit lost playing through the missions and unlocking characters. There are times when things got hairy for me later in the story mode and depending on the characters I chose to use, difficulty, and how I spent my soul points leveling up, I would end up having to play a couple missions in the mission mode to level the desired character. Also the hit detection did not feel right at times, which resulted in mashing the targeting button to make sure my attacks we not wasted and my combo score is not lost. There was a lot in which I enjoyed in my playthrough, but felt lost in regards to the story a number of times from not knowing the background, however, if you purchase the game new, there is a nice little surprise for newcomers and fans alike.

Now for that little surprise I was talking about if you get the game new. You get three free episodes of the Bleach anime series, downloadable from the PlayStation Network, using a voucher code found in the game packaging and note that it does require a PSN account. In regards to the time spent with the game, I had a lot of fun from start to finish and often times would switch between gameplay modes in the same sitting to help develop my characters.Unfortunately, my largest issue I had with my time spent was not knowing the background of the characters, so I think this would be most enjoyed by fans and newcomers to the series, not so much by those that have not seen the series.