Bleach: Brave Souls

Genre: Action

Players: 1, Online Content Sharing

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Review:

Bleach: Brave Souls is a free-to-play Action game released on mobile devices in 2016, ported to PC in 2020, then to PlayStation 4 in 2022, and then to Xbox One and Nintendo Switch in 2024. Based on the Bleach anime and manga, Brave Souls has players playing through an abbreviated version of the series’ story, fighting enemies from an overhead view.

Just to be clear, although this game follows the story of the series right from the start, that doesn’t mean that players who are new to Bleach will understand any of this – the game blasts you with a multitude of characters and events like it’s trying to speed-run through the story without actually making sure you understand any of it. Before long, you’ll likely just start skipping story stuff altogether – it hardly matters for the gameplay, and it’s so lacking coherency that you won’t be getting anything out of it but confusion and boredom.

The rest of the presentation uses colorful but somewhat simple 3D visuals with slightly diminutive versions of its characters and a lot of art from the anime and manga in menus. While the visuals here are decent but hardly impressive, the real stand-out in this game is its electric guitar and synth-heavy soundtrack, with standout tunes including Co-Op Quest, Summer Clap, Screaming Game, REpose of SoulS, Striker, and Working.

When it comes to the gameplay… honestly, I’m pretty perplexed. Oh, not about the gameplay itself, that’s pretty straightforward: you have three characters you can swap between using the D-Pad, each with their own signature attacks. Standard attacks are delivered with B, with other buttons on the controller assigned to special attacks with cooldowns, and you move through each area a bit like an Arcade-style brawler, taking on small groups of enemies before reaching a boss. All pretty standard fare.

No, what really confuses me is the difficulty, progression, and the overall flow of the game. Bleach: Brave Souls is a hot mess of a game where you’ll have to go through multiple menus to enter a level (each with their own load screen), then have to skip through pointless text dialogue (and another load screen), briefly fight a few pushover enemies before you get to the boss (and another load screen), take out the boss within seconds (load screen), see the results screen, and then get another load screen before heading back to the main menu. In all, for maybe 30 seconds of gameplay, you’ll endure multiple minutes of menu screens and load screens.

What’s more, I’m not seeing where the challenge is. Every enemy I’ve faced in this game is an absolute pushover, taking only a few hits to take down and not even getting a chance to fight back unless you let them. It really makes me wonder why I even put up with those load screens in the first place.

Then of course there’s the monetization element, and again I am so very confused. You’ll notice that I didn’t put a microtransaction warning at the start of this review, and that isn’t because microtransactions aren’t present here. Quite the opposite, the game is absolutely overloaded with them… but they all seem so superfluous and unnecessary. Right from the moment you log in, you are gifted with hundreds of messages giving you a massive load of the game’s multiple currencies, and practically dragged to the character-summoning menu, where you’ll be gifted dozens of free characters, including a guaranteed max-level high-rated character.

As if this game wasn’t already enough of a cakewalk, right from the start it just hands you the keys to the kingdom and makes you so absurdly powerful that it’s like it wants to absolutely ensure that you’ll never face anything even resembling a challenge. And with all this power, the only reason I can fathom that you would ever want to spend actual money on this game’s microtransactions is if you’re a series fan and want to get your favorite character.

I suppose I should also mention this game’s multiplayer, such as it is. Yeah, this isn’t multiplayer, you play with ghost data of other players, there’s no cooperation or anything like that.

In the end, I was left scratching my head playing Bleach: Dual Souls. It goes to all this effort to build up a massive roster of characters and multiple microtransaction elements, only to tear everything down by making the game absurdly easy and then giving the player a god mode character right from the start. And all of this is on top of gameplay that’s overloaded with menus and loading screens, and choked by text story that may remind fans of episodes of the show they liked, but do nothing to actually tell players a coherent story.

It is such a terrible mess, and I quickly grew exasperated with all of it. If you’re a Bleach fan, you may get a kick out of this, but I think your time is much better spent rewatching the show. For everyone else, don’t bother with this jumbled disaster of a game.

tl;dr – Bleach: Brave Souls is a free-to-play Action game where players theoretically fight enemies, but in reality they’ll spend most of their time in menus and on loading screens, and what little gameplay is here is absurdly easy, and made even easier by the wealth of free stuff the game gives you at its outset. Only the most staunch fans of the franchise will want to play this, and even they are better off spending their time just rewatching the show.

Grade: D+

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