Finally a fairly decent Bleach game comes our way, but the game does very little to bring Bleach into a new level for fans.
Bleach is like the lost child of the Shonen Jump franchises, and those of us that enjoy it more than the others have suffered a long and painful drought of nothing. Finally Bleach is back, and finally we get an arena fighting game to celebrate the return. While the developers are clearly fans of the series, the budget for the game doesn’t seem fair for the fans.
Bleach: Rebirth Of Souls
Release Date: March 21st 2025
Developer: Tamsoft
Publisher: Bandai Namco
Platforms: PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC
Upon opening Bleach: Rebirth of Souls, I was thoroughly impressed right from the get go. The developers are very clearly fans, and a lot of the animations and details for all the characters are spot on. The game even has probably the most polished and well done menu in all of gaming, complete with stylish animations and transition frames. This polish goes right into the game itself where the world of Bleach is brought to life in beautifully crafted scenes that seem to be drawn right from the manga itself. Then intertwined in it all is very flashy key art and titles that blend beautifully in combat. That’s not even counting the fun music they adopted to replace classic intros, and then putting a 3D spin on key opening sequences. All of this is done extremely well.
In an odd instance, I don’t know if by player mistake, I was immediately thrown into a tutorial that felt a little further along than I was. I was learning about the many different anime inspired systems, super attacks, and basic defense mechanics. Then right after finishing this, I was thrown into a more realistic tutorial that showed me everything again at a slower pace. It was an odd approach that actually worked for me because the pacing allowed me to understand the various layers of combat, and I immediately got to see the bright spot of the game, the combat.
In short, Rebirth of Souls has a rather in-depth fighting system that isn’t just a replication of other arena fighters. It’s actually fun, and while I don’t yet truly grasp everything it has to offer, it has kept me hooked. Instead of just straight pummeling opponents with one-off combo’s, there is a slight defense mechanic that is blended with predicting your opponent. Physically the game is very offense oriented, with very little to defend yourself with attacks, but it’s more than that.
Instead of straight health bars, the game offers power meters in different aspects, along with a selection of “lives” that can only be depleted with special attacks. The more you deplete lives, the more powerful attacks open up, and sometimes the battle can swing in favor of the one with less. It creates a really fun tug-of-war between characters, with most fights being nail biting finishers. The system never lets you get disheartened from falling behind, but it never lets you get comfortably ahead either.
As you progress through the story, or find harder opponents, you realize the fight isn’t over till it’s over. For me, this means everything. I was hugely disappointed that this game was “another” arena fighter, but the layers of depth in the combat really changed my perspective entirely. It’s so nice that a simple early mistake in any given match doesn’t immediately disqualify you from winning.
Instead Rebirth of Souls offers hefty combat where you can feel the weight of different characters and their weapons or attacks. You can quickly adjust to the various styles of combat, and find a fighting style that fits you. It’s incredibly thrilling to blast through enemies, and then follow up with a more strategic defensive approach in the next battle. What’s even better is the voice lines and art of the characters leans into what you love about each character, and actually getting to play these moments is incredible.
But the fall off from this is almost immediately evident when playing through the first scene in the story mode. I don’t know exactly what I was expecting with Rebirth of Souls, but I fully expected the story mode to be really awesome and the visuals of the cutscenes and opening sequences gave me faith. Instead I’m met with the total and complete opposite, where a story seems like it was quickly pieced together with too much content and not enough time. Other anime inspired games have some of the most incredible cutscenes in the industry. Bleach itself has several major spectacle pieces that would (or should) look good in 3D animation with modern technology. We get neither.
The story mode plays out like an extremely low budget visual novel of sorts, with a majority of the action all stripped away. You might be thinking, this is Shonen there is nothing left without the action….. You’re right. Every major set piece or action sequence is met with a blade slicing the screen and cutting it to black, almost like a placeholder for the team to come back and animate the sequence. Then when the screen returns, the characters are all set in their stationary positions and dragging through their dialogue sequences. The most movement I’ve witnessed has been characters very awkwardly walking to their spots, or jumping strangely behind another character and slapping them.
The cutscenes are horrendous visually, and beyond disappointing. Very stiff brightly lit characters, with models that look like enhanced PS3 figures from 10 years ago, and some of the most basic looking animations. Nothing about the cutscenes has been pleasing to the eye, and laughable at best. It’s a stark contrast to what we see while in combat. The animations in combat are incredible, super clean, very flashy, and then nothing translates to the cutscenes at all.
And it’s not just key moments that are cut out, the story seems like a crash course in Bleach with some minor moments and words slightly changed to fit the game. The pacing is mixed up with the game quickly touching on key points, and then tossing long visual sequences to tell huge plot points to further the story. At times, some of the story elements are blended into the battle sequences which kind of breaks up the battles, and allows some of the flashier battles to take place. Anything outside of that is met with the black screen.
There are moments that I wish had more emphasis, but overall it’s just telling the story of Bleach which I’m a fan of. And the visual appeal of pages ripping during the plot drops is visually fun to watch, while coloring and bringing to life key manga moments is also fascinating. So I enjoy the key moments, and watching them play out but if I didn’t already watch and read Bleach, I’d honestly think I would be lost fairly quickly.
It’s a lengthy story campaign, as it goes through various arcs leading right up to the current Blood War, but the amount of actual play time is minimal. Which is odd, considering that’s a huge strength of the game. However I feel like due to the length of the game, it stretched the team super thin and expecting them to fully animate these scenes, and put 100 percent effort, would be asking a lot. Maybe they were better off breaking it down into segments.
Bleach English dubs are also fairly touted as some of the better voice acting in the anime world, and I personally enjoy it more than the Japanese versions, but even this area seems to be lacking. With a lot of returning cast for the game you’d expect the same level of richness to the voice acting, but a lot of it just falls flat. Ichigo never gets old, and some of the other characters sound absolutely perfect, but a lot of lines by secondary characters have zero emotion behind them or just outright don’t translate well. At times the characters even sound a bit robotic, early on this happens a lot with Rukia explaining long sequences of events. A lot of dialogue sequences don’t truly fall on the actors themselves, it’s just poorly written scenes (perhaps poor translations) and you can tell the actors are questioning the lines.
And speaking of odd decisions. Between arcs in the story we are met with a Dragon Ball style bridge where an announcer discusses what just happened, where we are, and where the story is going. The speaker during these transitions again feels robotic, like a developer in the studio is doing a really rough translation into English and struggling to do it.
But that somewhat carries over to the various other modes as well. Multiplayer currently has no ranked mode or tournament modes. The online components consist of player made lobbies and one-off battles with random players. There is no real sense of progression at all. Offline mode has almost no real replayability considering the only options is the story mode with random quests, or local battle modes. I see no real longevity in this game beyond the 14-20 hour mark it takes to finish the story, which is a shame considering the arena fighting could lead to something substantial.
Overall am I excited to finally play a fairly decent Bleach game? Yes. Is that the sole reason why I’m playing the game? Also yes. If you take the IP out of the name, this game falls extremely short of being good and ends up just burying a fairly decent arena fighter. If I wasn’t excited to see my favorite characters on the screen, I’d probably lose interest quickly. The game clearly had a lot of ground to cover, and we got a lot of content with no real quality behind it.
