Review: Bleach Rebirth of Souls (Sony PlayStation 5)

My personal experience with prolific (VERY prolific) Japanese developer, Tamsoft, is mostly with its work with the action-based Hyperdimension brawlers, Senran Kagura, and the highly fanservicey stuff like Onechanbara and School Girl/Zombie Hunter. For the most part, these have been like pared-down Dynasty Warriors/Musou games. I wish Bleach Rebirth of Souls was like that. There was a Bleach game way back on the PS3 that was essentially a Musou, and it was probably the most memorable game I’ve played to use the license (Bleach: Soul Resurrección). It wasn’t by any means perfect, but it was memorable and did the job with the license admirably.

Bleach Rebirth of Souls, meanwhile, is a fighting game, and that’s not Tamsoft’s favourite hitting zone. We’ll get to that shortly, but to kick things off on a positive note: Rebirth of Souls Does do a decent job of covering the long and often meandering story of Bleach. You’ll want to have seen the anime anyway, but as far as abridgements go, this one brings you through all the key cliffhangers and memorable moments from the anime in a coherent manner. It does mean that you’ll spend a lot of time watching recreations of those key scenes before getting to the good stuff but… well, frankly that’s how the anime went as well.

All your favourite characters are there, too, and right from the start you can have a great time messing around with combinations in multiplayer. By pure coincidence the first time I dropped into the versus mode I chose Sajin Komamura (the wolf-headed Soul Reaper, and my personal favourite), and at random ended up with Kaname Tōsen as my opponent. It was only after making those selections that I remembered just how much I enjoyed their climatic battle in the Bleach anime itself, and it was pure fanservice to be able to summon Sajin’s big monster Bankai giant and have it battle away with Tōsen’s darkness Bankai form.

Yes, all the Bankai forms are recreated into the game, and balanced just well enough that they are fundamentally fun to play with. So on that side of things, the Tamsoft team have done the property justice: Just like the anime, fights start off relatively mundane, with “common” weaponry, before building up to each combatant unleashing some terrifying power and then it’s a true clash of the titans.

The problem is that Tamsoft isn’t really a developer of complex, nuanced combat systems. It’s great with fast-paced brawlers where you can mow through enemies like you’re cutting down grass. One-versus-one affairs, however, need to be more tactical and considered, and Bleach Rebirth of Souls is, unfortunately, a fair distance behind the Tekkens, Street Fighters, Dead or Alives, or even Jojos of the world (that All-Star Battle-R was quite the fighter!). There’s a basic triangle system in place, with attacks beating breaks, breaks beating blocks, and blocks blocking attacks. There’s nothing wrong with this as a foundation, but unfortunately the combat system never really goes beyond that. It’s button mashy and there’s very little room to outthink your opponent.

Tamsoft seems to have decided that the lives system would be where the nuance was, and in fairness, this is a good system. Each character starts battle with a certain number of Konpaku, and you’ll win if you can reduce their Konpaku to zero. Now, you have two choices. When you reduce the opponent’s health to 30%, you can land a Kikon, which will knock off some of the opponent’s Konpaku. Or you can take the risk and try to reduce it to 0%, which the killing blow does a lot more damage to the Konpaku total. If the opponent has any Konpaku left, they’ll then get back up, health restored. These differences are not insignificant, and can mean the difference between needing to reduce the opponent’s health below threshold two or three times to defeat them. But, of course, if you take the risk and go for the big swing, your opponent might be able to reduce you into Kikon range themselves.

This is a good system, and it’s implemented well, but it can’t compensate for the underlying simplicity of the combat system. There, Tamsoft does try and throw smoke and mirrors at you with all kinds of terminology and button commands, but it does always boil down to a combat system that values speed and a narrow range of attacks (as well as the timing for when to unleash Bankai, Kikon, and so on) over a nuanced and varied combo system. It’s a lot of fun while it lasts, it’s just that it won’t be too long because you’ll be wishing that there was more to it than that.

Bleach Rebirth of Souls is authentic to the anime, does a good job with the narrative retelling, and is meticulous at giving you all your favourite characters to brawl around with. I can’t see a Bleach fan picking this up and not having some immediate good fun with it. I just can’t see them still having fun with it a year from now, and while the Bleach star may have faded a little from a decade or whatever ago, I do think that there was more that could have been done with it than this.