Bleach: Dark Souls

Duncan's soul laid-bare...

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The big, greasy, myopic otaku Emperor is naked!

Yes, today for your benefit and edification I am going to take on the role of the heroic little boy that pointed out the guy in charge didn't really have any pants on. My double whammy of societal disillusionment comes by saying say that fighting games on the DS are not much cop, and Anime based games tend not to be much good either. This left-right combo of thunderous truth didn't bode well for Bleach: The Blade of Fate, and its fair to say the boss is still buck nekkid.

Now, all you socially maladapted sunlight adverse anime fanatics should know two things. First, please direct your sweaty near religious fervour at Editor Luke not me, and second: I count myself amongst you. I have two different editions of the complete boxed set of Cowboy Bebop, stacks of out-of print anime magazines, a library of other titles some I know are just plain embarrassing, and shelf upon shelf of manga. Manga and anime are pretty great, they just have yet to actually make for a good game, or vice-versa. I'm looking at you Devil May Cry.

Bleach, for the uninitiated, is a wildly popular Japanese anime series that recently broadcasted something north of its 150th episode. Given even the most successful series usually call it a day and wrap the storyline somewhere between the 30th and 60th episodes, you can get an idea of how abidingly popular the franchise is. And a popular anime franchise means truly bonkers fans, and truly bonkers fans means a merchandising tsunami that would make George Lucas blush. Some of the saner accessories include commemorative crucifixes, dolls of female characters featuring what are described as 'boisterous assets', and genuine imitation Substitute Death God Plaques. The website selling the last of these misspelled 'plaque' with a 'g' instead of the 'q', but personally I think it works better.

Games born of merchandising tie-ins are easily amongst the worst games ever made. Last year the game of The Fantastic Four movie sequel took the biscuit by popular acclaim, as a paragon of lazy and cynical development. Bleach: The Blades of Fate is not nearly as bad, and has clearly been made by a team with a lot of love for the material, but I just can't bring myself to believe the experience is worth your hard earned pocket-money.

The game itself is at heart a 2D beat-'em-up, in much the same mould as those great Mortal and Street progenitors of old. Jump, block, high attack, low attack, rush, circle-forward-then-X, all been done before. None the less, this genre seems to retain its eternally loyal fanbase. However unbelievably fast and beautiful the latest Virtua-Fighter, or how realistic and kinetic the 'boisterous assets' of the next-gen Tekken become, old school 2D style fight titles like Guilty Gear and King of Fighters will continue to sell millions of copies.

The extremely lightly recounted plot of the game sees you as Ichigo and his friend's quest to go and save damsel in distress Rukia. Fortunately, this seems to be achievable by walking in a more or less straight line to where Rukia is imprisoned, beating the stuffing out of anyone who stands in your way. Unfortunately, in order to live up to the idea of it being a 'quest', and linear level progression being so very gauche these days, some fights will arbitrarily impose requirements for actual progression. Your opponent will illogically tell you that he wont' be considered defeated unless you finish with full spirit power, no spirit power, and sometime a secret third criterion they won't even actually tell you what it is! How about I pull your head off, mount it on a mop, and ride around on it like a wooden horsey? Would that constitute victory around here? No? The addition of some levels requiring particular stats or combo-counts seems a pretty cheap way to spin out the length of the game, and can result in infuriating loops despite ostensibly repeatedly winning.

Aside from the obvious appeal of featuring pretty much all of the extensive Bleach cast list, Blade of Fate tries to differentiate itself from the crowd with a couple of key features. The first of these is the Spirit Deck and special move system. During gameplay, the leaping about and slashing will occur on the rigid top screen, whilst on the lower-screen you can either display a list of shortcuts to special moves, or two out of a shuffled deck of power-ups and buffs. These might be health additions, speed boosts, soul-power (the juice to pull of special attacks) augmentations, or it might be de-buffs of the opponents. There are over 50 of these different effect cards, the bulk of which can be collected along the way as achievements. Whilst these random acts certainly do spice up the fairly monotonous basic combat, there are two essential problems with this. The noble human finger, product of millennia of selective hereditary advantage, has always been a fairly rubbish way to directly interface with the DS touch screen. Although the Spirit Deck activation screen is 80% comprised of just two buttons for you to push, it can be pretty hit and miss getting the card to engage. The DS responds best to small point of light pressure, such as the stylus, pen lid, or a fingernail. You'll be in the position to apply none of these, and the only way left is either a hearty whack with the ball of your right thumb, or to take your fingertips away from either the movement or attack controls, with often punishing results.

The touch screen can also be used to fire-off special attacks as shortcuts to the button-combos. This is actually a more interesting feature than it initially sounds, as it allows the novice player to still have access to the fancy moves, but at the expense of speed (as its often quicker to perform the combo than take your hands off the controls) and also at the expense of not having the Spirit Deck buffs to hand.

The graphics and response times are all perfectly adequate for the material, but nothing you didn't see more than once on latter day Gameboy Advance titles. One of the few genuinely redeeming features is the wireless multiplayer. Many of the single-player modes will pit you against more than one opponent, which quickly degenerates into repetitive throwing moves and a breakdown of any tactical flow the gameplay might have once possessed. However, having three of your mates monkeying around on screen as well pushes the whole experience right through the silliness threshold into a slugfest that can actually be good fun, especially with all four of you constantly pulling out Spirit Deck cards in a fairly lunatic cascade of stacking buffs and de-buffs.

Bleach: The Blade of Fate is definitely a title only for the dedicated Bleach fanboy or fangirl. There is nothing essentially wrong with it, but it doesn't stand out in any way from the last decade or so of handheld developments. This isn't the typically lazy or cynical tie-in you often see with merchandise games, and I am reasonably sure the developers actually made exactly the game they set out to. Perhaps the only really remiss part of Blade of Fate, then, is its apparent complete lack of ambition to manifest any of the energy, engaging characters, or compulsiveness that has made the show such a hit.

Anime doesn't often lend itself to games, and fighting games even less often lend themselves to the DS, so this wasn't that likely to be a winner from the get-go. I'm prepared to assume that for a fair proportion of the ludophile public, a DS isn't their primary gaming machine. Use your home entertainment based console to do the heavy lifting of games, be they old skool 2D or shiny new multi-dimensional challengers. Your DS is clearly for that virtual puppy you know mum wouldn't let you have, or unusual leftfield offerings like Phoenix Wright or How old Are Your Eyebrows 2: More Eyebrow Training.

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By Duncan Lawson