Bleach Brave Souls Review
Bleach Brave Souls was released on PC Steam back on 17 August 2020, it is a free game that is heavily monetized as one would expect from a direct Mobile to PC Port. After watching Bleach Thousand Year Blood War, I had the bleach-itch. Then I remembered about Bleach Brave Souls, so I went ahead and gave it a go & downloaded it on Steam. The game literally threw a bunch of random things at me as I never played this before and had no idea what any of the items given did but what was nice was that the game let me choose which 5 Star hero I wanted to start off with. Without bothering searching up tier list of anything of the sort, I was torn between my two favourite Bleach characters: Grimmjow & Byakuya. Eventually I settled with Grimmjow and cruised through the game without many issues. While playing Bleach Brave Souls, I went back to binge Bleach again and re-watched the entire series once again, probably the 4th time but it was totally worth it.
Combat
The combat was surprisingly better than I originally expected. Although it feels quite clunky at times, it is still manageable and fun. My biggest issue is with the full screen skill animations when using an ultimate that you cannot turn off. Watching it a few times was pretty cool but afterwhile it becomes super annoying.
The control reminds me a bit about Little Fighter II but anime bleach style, although each character only has 5 skills, KLab Inc really knows how to capitalize on an Anime Heros Collector. Multiple different versions of the same hero but with different skills. That is honestly ingenious, I don’t think I played another one that done it this well. Afterwhile, auto-play gets unlocked and honestly, unless I am doing PVP, I just let auto-play do its job. I spent the next few hours just mindlessly pressing next, next, next to advance in the story. Honestly, not very well thought out.
Yes, I know Bleach has a huge storyline but, I seen the anime at least 4 times and read the manga at least twice now, to me, it became a lot more of a grind than anything else, considering a lot of the features were locked behind story. Otherwise, this combat is just fine for a mobile game, and I have no quarrels over it.
Elements
As expected, Bleach Brave Souls also have an element system called attributes, just like one would expect from most gacha games.
There are a total of 5 attributes in this gacha game which are the following, where Light and Dark are separated as normal in their own elemental advantage category.
- Red: Power
- Green: Technique
- Blue: Speed
- Yellow: Mind
- Purple: Heart
PVP
There are only 1 PVP modes in Bleach Brave Souls, Vs Battle. Vs Battle is not true PVP as it is not real time PVP, instead, as with most gacha games, it is AI-Controlled opponents using the defence team the players have set up.
There is another mode called Arena but that is not PVP as you will be queueing with other players (or bots) to vs against bots.
Vs Battle is pretty straight forward, it is 100% AI controlled for both your opponents and you. It is a straight 3v3 brawl and last one standing wins. It all depends on and really boils down to your team composition and your battle combat power. Pretty straight forward honestly. It is also quite cool how they incorporate the series division ranking as part of the rankings in PVP. You start off as 10th Seat and you climb your way higher for better rewards.
Cash Shop
This is a gacha game, it is extremely pay2win, or you could say, pay to progress. However way you want to slice it, if you pay, you will get out ahead. The game is old and has tons of content for any free player to enjoy themselves as long as they don’t want to be super competitive. As the game has been out for a long time now, that also mean, there are a lot of different characters and builds to go for different content and such making gacha rolls a lot more intense as there is a bigger pool and higher chance of not receiving want you want; hence why paying would make it all the more convenient.
State of Game
The steam game runs very smooth on my PC, with the only exception of anything I click, even when accepting gifts from my bag or finishing daily quests. The game decides to do a mini load which last up to 2-5 seconds, this is super annoying and frustrating and enough for me to just want to rage log and not play anymore. Not to mention, there are way to many load screens. To do story, I probably have to click 4-5 times which each has its own load screen, this is beyond stupid. If we look beyond those inconveniences, there is actually a decent game and has over 2,000 players on Steam Charts alone. Then we can factor in the mobile players on Google Play & Apple store, I would say this game is super healthy and will be around for a lot longer & after all it is also the only Bleach title game around too.
Artwork
The artwork style in Bleach Brave Souls is chibi-like and cute, it is very detailed despite being released back in 2015. It looks very dated, but it is kind of holding up since it is an anime-style game. If I was the developers, I would totally touch it up a bit as it has so much potential and the Bleach fan-base is much bigger than they think. Maybe even a sequel, a bleach MMORPG would seem so good and fun. Lots to explore, the core story is already set and there already four different type of races Humans, Shinigami, Hollows, Quincy and Bount. However, that’s probably just totally wishful thinking on my side.
Fun
Bleach Brave Souls was very enjoyable however, story mode felt like all I was doing at one point. There were just way too many chapters and too many things are locked behind completing story chapter xyz. After a while it gets really tedious and even worse when you can just have it on auto-play and complete it without many difficulties. That is where it was really lacking in creativity. Further, at first glance, the character building looked pretty in-depth, but once you look closer, it is just a false impression as eventually you max out the entire tree, leaving no real builds or choices to be made. I personally wouldn’t recommend this Gacha game unless you are absolutely bored out of your mind with nothing to do or if you are just a die-hard bleach fan. Even then, after ~15 hours of playing, I really didn’t have much left to do besides continuing pressing “Next” in story. If you wish for something a lot more fun, I will totally recommend Monster Super League or wait for the highly anticipated Honkai Star Rail releasing later this month,
