Bleach: Soul Ignition Demo Impressions

I don't know about the rest of the world, but I've been waiting for a Bleach game to be released on the PS3 pretty much since the PS3 has been out. With numerous releases of the franchise on the PSP, I knew it only had to be a matter of time before one would get thrown in the home console's direction. Well, that time has finally come. Bleach: Soul Ignition is on its way, with a demo available on the Japanese PSN, but is this game going to be the one we've been waiting for?

No Ichigo, it's not cool.

First off, I'd like to say that I am a fan of the Bleach anime and manga, so my opinion of some of the game releases may be slightly biased. I've found enjoyment in pretty much every Bleach game I have played, from the Heat the Soul and Soul Carnival series' on PSP, to the two games released on Wii. Blade Battlers 2 on PS2 was by far the most fun to me, and I could go back to it even now and have countless hours of fun playing it with friends. That being said, the Bleach: Soul Ignition demo is one of the worst things I have ever experienced. It almost made me physically ill to play through it.

To start with, the graphics are horrid. Everything looks washed out, and enemies have hardly any detail at all. Ichigo's character model and animations are passable at best, but that's the only positive thing I could find in this department. They honestly could have just ported the latest Heat the Soul game over, and it would have looked better than this. I realize that anime based games don't really have that high standards, but come on. This is almost 2011, the era of Hi-Definition for crying out loud. This wouldn't even be mediocre standards if it were on Wii. Even so, I can deal with bad graphics. It's Bleach, so I'm willing to overlook lackluster visuals if the gameplay is decent.

Saying the gameplay is "decent" would be a huge overstatement for this game, however. Hell, saying it plays like crap would be a compliment. Soul Ignition is a hack and slash action game, putting you against hordes of mindless enemies and slightly smarter bosses. Playing Soul Ignition consists of mashing the Square button frantically while Ichigo performs the same combo over and over, while fighting the clunky camera simultaneously. I tried mixing up the button presses, delaying attacks in hopes that I would see a different animation, but there were none. You can chain a ground combo into a jump, and continue with an air combo, though! Neat, right? Aside from standard square button attacks, you have ranged fireball type attacks on triangle which seem pretty worthless. There's also a guard, dash, and auto lock-on button, which for some reason auto unlocks when you get knocked down. You also have a special attack that consumes a blue meter at the bottom of the screen, which is decent for taking down multiple enemies at once. There's another meter around Ichigo's portrait that you can use to become more powerful and unleash a more devastating attack.



All of this is presented in a very sub-par package, and the enemy AI doesn't force you to use any of these extra attacks. The hordes of hollow monsters are dumb. Dumb and docile. Not only that, but none of these abilities are Ichigo's signature attacks. This is probably the biggest disappointment at all for me. This demo has failed in delivering any fan service at all, which is a huge problem. An anime based game that doesn't feel like the actual anime is like a filler episode, and a lot of people skip those for a reason.

Now I realize that this is just a demo. It's not fair to judge a game based purely on a demo, even though it's not very often that the final product is a vastly improved. There are also supposed to be multiple characters to play with, and I'm betting there will even be other versions of Ichigo to play as that will feature his traditional moves and Bankai. But from what the demo indicates, adding more playable characters is only a drop in the bucket of things this game will need to succeed. I'm sorry to say it, but the long wait for a Bleach game on PS3 looks like it may have been for nothing. This game would sooner extinguish your soul, rather than ignite it.