Bleach Wii Playtest

December 16th, 2006, 17:47 Posted By: wraggster

Via IGN

Sega and Sony have been flooding the Japanese game market with Bleach adaptations since last year. And we're talking quite the devastating flood. Over a period of less than two years, the popular anime series has seen 9 unique games (that's 2 DS, 1 GameCube, 2 PS2 and 4 PSP).

With Sega's latest adaptation, Bleach Wii Hakujin Kiramkeu Rondo, the Wii gets in on the party, just two weeks following launch. And guess what? Sega has made the completely unexpected and surprising choice of turning the anime into a one-on-one fighter!

Bleach Wii has all the things you'd expect from an anime fighter. Let's see... there's the large cast of fighters, with at least 14 characters pulled from the anime. There's the story mode, with voiced dialogue sequences between bouts. There's the arcade mode, where you fight 8 matches as the character of your choice. For multiplayer, there's a versus mode, which also includes options for Player versus CPU and CPU versus CPU. And, of course, the expected training and gallery modes.

Sega has added a few things to the formula. First up are 20+ second load times prior to a fight. Actually, this itself might have been influenced by the lengthy load times found in the first PSP adaptation.

The Wii version also attempts to separate itself from the rest of the pack with its full support of the Wiimote. The controller is used for directly slashing your sword. By slashing up to down, left to right and thrusting into the screen, you can, in theory, make your in-game counterpart perform the equivalent motion. You'll have to ignore the fact that you're viewing the action from the side rather than in the first person. You'll also have to use your imagination when playing as the four characters who don't use weapons.

Outside of these direct controls, things get a bit more complicated. Unblockable versions of all the moves can be performed by holding down the B button as you slash, or you can hold down A and swing away for individual special attacks. You move your character with the nunchuck analogue pad, guard with Z and dash by holding down C. To slip into one of those super mega powerful alternative universe modes that are always featured in these games, you shake the nunchuck once your power meter has been filled up.

With all the button pressing and extraneous shaking going on, one has to question if Bleach really manages to deliver the feel of actually fighting with a sword, or if the motion-based controls are just a gimmick tacked on to a fighting system that could have been done just as well with standard controls. The answer is neither of the above. Bleach does a pretty terrible job of reading your Wiimote motions. I couldn't get my characters to do the slashes I wanted, resulting in non-stop thrusting. Standard controls would have been more preferable.

But then, I suppose, Bleach Wii would've been just another anime-based fighting game.

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