Although Bleach is the flashiest member of the shonen anime “big three,” standing shoulder to shoulder with mega-popular series like One Piece and Naruto, it has long suffered from middle child syndrome when it comes to arena fighter adaptations. Bleach Rebirth of Souls aims to break the cycle of run-of-the-mill anime fighters this series has previously been part of, delivering a unique action game that attempts to raise the genre to greater heights. Its story mode is admittedly an uneven jumble, ricocheting back and forth between a laughable attempt at a visual novel cobbled together like a last-second afterthought and a visually striking and stylish spectacle, as Bleach should be. But developer Tamsoft’s herculean effort to enrich Rebirth of Souls with complex combat (with some room for improvement) saves it from being just another fly-by-night arena fighter.
It’s easy to get overloaded by a bunch of confusing anime jargon as Rebirth of Souls’ tutorial explains how its health bar, counters, and super moves work, but here’s the quick way to understand things: This is a 3D arena fighter with Super Smash Bros.’s life stock system, Sekiro’s stance-breaking swordplay, and Bleach’s unique visual flair. Unlike other arena fighters, which often have combat so shallow you only need to find a single combo or spam super moves to win matches, Bleach’s combat feels like a challenging game of tug-of-war – one where victories are clinched rather than mindlessly stomped out of your opponents.
Each sword swing feels snappy and weighty as you teleport around the screen, ambushing your enemies from behind and breaking their guard. It never gets old to see large blocks of text wrap around freeze-framed characters with every successfully landed counter and super move. Even when you play Rebirth of Souls on its Standard Mode button layout, which streamlines things by letting you dish out flashy auto-combos, it harbors a wink of complex and unique mechanics specific to each character that warrant further exploration. That could be Shinji’s counter-heavy moveset or the in-your-face brawler style of my personal favorite, Soi Fon – it’s so satisfying to stun lock opponents whenever she zips all over the place with a flurry of punches and kicks. Plus, her super move is a massive missile arm canon that she has hunker down to fire, which is too enticing a contradiction to pass up as a main.
However, Standard Mode matches do have a samey button rhythm to them after a while without much expression outside of mashing light and heavy button combos into a super. Having two move inputs that double as a distance closer alongside often unreliable ranged attacks does not make for a remarkable competitive game. It also doesn’t help that the movement feels oddly stiff, with slow dashes and a scarcity of defensive options. Typically, whenever you’re getting your ass kicked, fighting games bail you out by filling up your meter that effectively allows you to take some pressure off with a flashy super or counter. Other arena fighters like Naruto and Dragon Ball get around these counter move deficits by giving you a dedicated button to charge your super bars or spend portions of your meter for last second teleportations to avoid disaster.
In contrast, outside of two defensive retaliation mechanics called Awakenings and Reversals (with the former activating as a late-game transformation to buff your damage), the only way to build your super move or flash step teleports in Rebirth of Soils is tied to having dealt enough combos in the first place. The limited defensive mechanics grow even more dire when successfully blocking an opponent’s offensive onslaught can be immediately undone by them comboing into a guard breaker — which should be virtually unheard of in any self respecting fighting game.
All of the above makes the back and forth of Standard Mode matches a bit tiring as you wait for a flash step bar to come back or pray you don’t get whiff punished into oblivion thanks to a weird attack range. Thankfully, playing Rebirth of Souls in Manual Mode alleviates a lot of the restrictiveness those training wheels can cause, giving you the ability to mix together (or cancel out of) a variety of light and heavy combos into metered special moves. That makes Manual feel like the “intended” way to play if you’re looking for a more serious fighter because you aren’t limited to a light and heavy combo string with the occasional super move punctuation mark. Manual Mode allows you to cancel out combos on a dime and deliver an infinite string of attacks, letting you effectively express yourself as you learn what assortment of attacks will deal the most damage while looking good doing so. That said, it could still do with more optimization to things like sluggish dashes, inconsistent attack range hit confirmations, and a deficit of defensive movements to make matches feel less rigid and constrictive.
As a massive fan of the Bleach anime and manga’s stunning artistry, stirring character development, and shocking plot twists, I had high hopes that Rebirth of Souls could deliver a worthwhile story mode. Sadly, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. By and large, cutscenes in an anime fighter should act as a sparkly reward at the end of battle, meant to bring the momentum of a fight to a thrilling climax. At the best of times, like in the Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm series, they can be so well animated that they could substitute for watching the actual shows. That is not always the case with Rebirth of Souls – if anything, they nearly bring things to a screeching and embarrassing halt where you’re not sure if you’re meant to laugh on purpose or not.
The look of combat clearly had a lot of tender love and care put into it, but the story moments between that action instead play out like a cheap visual novel. Outside of a few pre-rendered cutscenes, the SparkNotes version of the anime this story mode attempts to tell is a rushed, hobbled mess. Instead of being greeted by bombastic scenes where my favorite characters clash, I was met with Machinima-looking animations where in-game models would fart out energy waves at each other and stiffly fall to the ground. Even the emotionally heady scenes lose all sense of tension as its characters move around like clumsy action figures with limited points of articulation in bright, low-poly arenas. What’s more, exciting moments like sword clashes and beam struggles lose all of their gravitas as these scenes incessantly cut to black with bright slashes on the screen that look less like a creative choice for dramatic effect and more like a placeholder for an animation that wasn’t added in time.
If this was a genuine attempt to resemble a visual novel, it definitely missed the mark, as it feels more like an unfinished first draft – and with review codes less than a day before launch, it’s hard not to see this as an intentional hope that fans will buy-in based solely on the goodwill of the franchise. Which is a shame, because both its English and Japanese voice cast are putting in work with their vocal performances and the character models are faithful recreations that do look great in action. As if Bandai Namco took pointers from Invincible season 2’s joke about how animators cut corners to make more scenes, Rebirth of Souls put all of its focus on the fights, and every moment outside of them looks like a fan-made animator’s first crack at recreating the anime as a result.
At the same time, however, Tamsoft is weirdly able to weaponize its limited, awkward looking cutscenes to drive home the charm of Bleach’s filler episodes. Moments of levity during a handful of original story mode chapters where characters take a break from slashing each other to play high-stakes games of soccer, go on haunted house dates, or rinse each other at fighting games have the right kind of jank to their slapstick animation. These periodic excursions are disarmingly charming to watch. Side characters who’d otherwise be ignored on Rebirth of Souls roster like Shuhei or Izuru get more dimension to them, encouraging you to invest time in learning how to play them because of how compelling and personable their slice-of-life segments are.
