Years ago I asked, where was a Dragon Ball Kakarot and a Naruto Storm series for Bleach? I wanted to go through the story without having to go through the terrible pacing that the anime adaptations of the aforementioned series had and didn't feel like reading the source material. I eventually finished the original anime run before it's cancellation months before this very game would come out. Talk about ill timing. I did try it out of sheer curosity considering I do like everything up until the Soul Society arc and strongly dislike everything after. I thought that the many drawn out, pointless and boring henchmen fights of the Arancar arc would be more tolerable as gameplay since it's now less than 3 minute fights rather watching them play out. More or less, I got what I wanted. There's no Fullbring arc but I strongly dislike that so much that this game leaving it out felt like a sigh of relief.
The core gameplay however is where unfortunately is where Rebirth of Souls strongly suffers. It plays worse than any of the Dragon Ball arena fighters and any of CyberConnect's anime licensed games. Movement feels stiff in that the characters can't can't run, they only move by stepping so the act of zoning and closing the distance feels very cumbersome. You won't be moving at very fast speeds by comparison to say Dragon Ball Sparking Zero. Your main way of closing the distance is using a teleport attack by pressing one of the triggers and x. You can't power up like in DB games and there isn't a substitution jutsu cooldown like Naruto Storm.Your main means of using special attacks is by hitting your opponents. This yet another very awkward quirk of the fighting. You can't do a combo unless if the strike is hitting your enemy so if you strike and you aren't touching someone, it will just be an awkward slash and no follow up move can be done. There's 3 attack buttons when all you really need is 2 since it follows 3D action game logic of chaining light and heavy attacks.
There's also a live system during fights which sort of works like finishing off enemies with your supers like in Playstation All Stars and the enemy having two health bars instead of rounds like in the Injustice games. It doesn't really add much other than mashing the right trigger like a madman when the enemy is at critical.
To end off everything, you have two seperate buttons for guarding and guard breaking when all you needed to do was have one. Have it be mapped to L1 and if you time the block animation correctly, you can do a parry. You know like most parry systems in a game.
Due all of this I eventually lowered to casual mode when facing off against Ikkaku as Ichigo. Luckily causal mode was accomdating enough to see the game through to the end minus one fight with Byayuka where his jobber arancar enemy kept teleporting around making him hard to hit.
After all this, I'm sort of soft on the game mainly due it's story mode. It's more or less the story of the anime with a mostly weaker soundtrack, it's non superpowered characters and most of Shinji's Vizorded gang adapted out and the anime filler arcs removed. Oh but this game does have it's own share of filler weirdly like Dragon Ball Kakarot all though not as charming like in the latter. Grimmjow's fate was bizarrely altered and directed like Guldo's death in Kakarot.
This is where everything loops back in of itself despite Rebirth of Souls' weak gameplay, it's a solid way of reliving the series outside of the aforementioned changes. I enjoyed going through the first two arcs especially Soul Society. Aarancar arc is much more bearable due to the lengthy henchmen battles being reduced to less than 3 minute gameplay sequences especially thanks to that easy mode. The game is mostly cutscenes as expected considering my Kakarot and Storm comparisons but this is what I came to this title for and I got it when I heard of how faithful it was.
It was fun to go to relive going through Ichigo's backstory and how he could've been a more interesting character than he ended up being. It was great to relive Soul Society and reminded me that the series could've been well written. It was so much fun mocking and ridiculing the Arancar arc for all it's problems and writing shortcomings in a "video game story that is a complete trainwreck" kind of way.
Overall, I already knew going in that the game played awkwardly and was below standard gameplay wise of your usual arena fighter adaptation but it was the Dragon Ball Kakarot and Naruto Storm that I asked for. I'm more surprised that it even exists at all.
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