Bleach: The Blade of Fate on the Nintendo DS is essentially a fighting game with all of the characters from theBleach anime and manga rolled into a Street Fighter style fighter. Where instead of locking fists with one another, the players lock swords, nunchucks and many other destructive weapons at each other with ridiculous special powers as well. This title isn’t strictly just for Bleach fans; it’s actually a solid fighting game in it’s own right.
For those that don’t know what Bleach is I’ll explain. Bleach is a manga and anime that’s been produced for a good few years now and have a very solid following. With over 150 episodes of the anime show under it’s belt it’s been very successful and a very long show to produce. The main premise of the title is about Ichigo Kurosaki, who’s a high school student. He’s lucky enough to be able to see ghosts and one day Ichigo sees a ninja spirit sent from heaven to destroy corrupted souls known as hollows. He is pulled into the Spirit World where these creatures live, with some of his friends and the adventure starts there.
Although much of this back story is not explained in the title, the Story Mode is fairly extensive. Although the cut-scenes have no to little animation to them the voice actors are good and everything is subtitled and there’s also an option to skip all of the cut-scenes and get onto the actual fighting. Which is always a good thing.
Whereas it’s counterpart, Bleach: Shattered Blade on the Wii had many cut scenes and was an easy game to play, with little special moves to memorize and was basically mastered within a few hours, Blade of Fate is very different. In the traditional fighter style, there are the standard attacks attached to the main console buttons and by doing an insane move combination a special move destroys the entire screen and will knock the enemy over.
There is also the Spirit Cards that are controllable via the touch screen on the Nintendo DS. These cards can be automatically generated and this will often lead to the best results for a novice, or generated personally for old hands at the title. These cards will allow the player to pull of an even more powerful special attack, but only once the power gauge has been filled sufficiently with enough fighting.
The moves in Blade of Fate will take a while to memorize, and although they are fairly easy to pull off, some of them are overly complicated and require a very fast thumb against the d-pad to do anything. Still, the use of the Spirit Cards is very helpful with pulling off the stronger special moves. The Spirit Cards are randomly generated out of 15 options, so it really is luck of the draw in terms of what type of cards you get and how well they can be used.
There are plenty of modes to choose from as well, although the main meat of the game is the extensive story mode, and owing to the fact that up to 32 different players can be unlocked throughout the game there’s plenty of replay value for the more dedicated fan. If the story mode becomes cumbersome then it’s easy enough to move across to arcade mode or even the online multiplayer mode. Although if many Spirit Cards are used the multiplayer mode can become very laggy and tiresome itself.
The controls have also been executed brilliantly. Aside from the slightly irritating touch screen niggles, such as not being able to scroll down with the stylus even though it’s on the touch screen, the basic use of the touch screen has been done well and sparingly. The actual d-pad response is very quick and accurate. There’s no lag between movements and the special moves are easy enough to do, although they need to be done very quickly.
The basic in game graphics are nothing to shout home about. The characters are all easily recognizable, and being pixelated in appearance does not detract from the main game play, and the cut-scenes, though primitive, have been done very well.
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