Bleach: The Blade of Fate Review (DS)

The high point of Bleach: The Blade of Fate came and went while I was playing through the story mode, a couple of talking-head cut scenes long of the intro. My character was squaring off against a representative of the ne’er-do-well Soul Society in typically overwrought Japanimate style- dramatic beads of sweat, gritted teeth, ‘my bushido is bigger than yours’ etc. I was tapping my way through the text boxes, already envisioning a paragraph on the timeless inducement to facepalm that is a story in a fighting game, when this little number leapt out at me-

“...snivelling dandelion!”

Genius. Sheer, unmitigated genius. I almost fell off my chair in my haste to scribble it down. Now thoroughly attentive, I clicked to the next line of dialogue and took the second masterstroke full on the chin-

“...pig-straddler!”

Breathtaking. Lord knows who localised the game, but they deserve a Pulitzer (and your hard-earned banknotes) for those four words alone. Hand over the plaque, Dead Head Fred, there’s a new literary kingpin in town!

Treasure as a whole also deserves major props for being one of the few developers to put a decent fighting game on the DS.

Trout-fiddler!

Bleach: The Blade of Fate is apparently based on an anime series which commands an avid internet following, but as an ignorant gaijin I consider it a moral obligation to steer clear of the specifics (and besides, what anime series doesn’t command some kind of avid following somewhere?). Suffice to say there are twenty-eight very probably ‘much-loved’ characters ripe for the unlocking here, and a story campaign in which to watch them waving their mystical phalluses at one another. Or should that be phalli? Answers by email, please.

While the frenetic, jargon-heavy combat doesn’t approach the distilled perfection of a Street Fighter or even a Guilty Gear, Bleach is far from an exercise in button-spamming. You can string together light, medium and heavy attacks with X, Y and A, each varying in range and speed as you might expect, while guarding is the province of curmudgeonly Mr Right Trigger. Specials and evasive moves are handled in an intricate if somewhat unintuitive manner: the ‘spirit power’ gauge at the bottom of the screen drains when you teleport-dodge or skip between foreground and background, and fills up automatically with time; the ‘spiritual pressure’ gauge at the top can be drawn off to cancel damage and dish out the pyrotechnics.

If all of this sounds repellently in-depth, you probably won’t appreciate the inclusion of ‘spirit cards’. Player and AI characters each have (randomised) access to a deck of fifteen such cards, which can be used to buff up attributes (temporarily endowing oneself with infinite spiritual pressure, for instance) or reduce those of the opponent. Two are available for use at any time, and you can obtain new cards either by winning battles in various modes or spending dough at the shop. It’s a striking but slightly mixed addition: too cunningly wrought to be dismissed as an attempt to clamber onto the crowded card-battling bandwagon, but too destabilising, too dependent on blind luck, to be welcomed with open arms.

Simpering cabbage-monger!

While the spirit card system has its downsides, the user-friendly approach bumps Bleach back into 8/10 territory. The trials and tribulations of pad control have cast a shadow over unreal butt-kicking since the genre took its first few steps beyond the arcade in the mid-nineties. Triple-three-quarter-turn special moves may be a cinch with a joystick, but putting them into practice on a D-pad is like picking locks with a jellyfish. Not so this particular blade, with its spanky-dan touch controls. Unleashing a megadeath technique is simply a matter of tapping one of the fat glossy panels on the lower screen (admittedly only the heavier attacks can be pulled off in this fashion); spirit cards, too, are put into play by mashing the requisite image.

All of which frees you to concentrate on more important matters i.e. getting the most out of the extremely diverse move and ability sets. And you’ll need to get the most out of them, if you’re to survive against some of the thugs online. Setting up a connection takes barely a minute, and you can pick from ranked or one-off matches against up to three other players. The wireless connection and DS-owning friend deficient will be thankful for the local single-cart multiplayer.

Flea-ridden pineapple molester!

Visually the Blade of Fate is a little lacking in soul, though this probably owes a lot to the polished but underwhelming original anime designs. The 2D sprites at least zip around with nary a frame rate hitch, and the bigger, badder moves are suitably sparkly. On the audio front the most I can say is that I wasn’t particularly compelled to turn the volume down. There’s some moderately convincing voice-acting here and there, though for much of the proceedings you’ll be left in the lurch with those text boxes.

But you certainly won’t be left in the lurch with the game as a whole. Bleach: The Blade of Fate is a highly capable albeit niche fighter which plays to the strengths of the DS hardware. Advocates of the handheld hadoken (not to mention blistering put-downs) shouldn’t think twice.