Bleach: Rebirth of Souls Review (Evil Squidward)
I want so badly to like this game. but even with the patch its plagued by the usual anime-game problems. someone in this team definitely cares. but its not the testing team.
52 hit soifon confirmed soifon combos? the same 4 abuse-case characters in every single match (ulqiorra, toshiro, aisen, soifon)? host-based latency issues on top of a clunky rock-paper-scissors fighting style means even on 4 out of 5 bars of ping you get fcked every game if you arent hosting because the host is allways safe to block and gets priority in every grab. so the whole game after story mode is just watching the same 4 characters sit there blocking until you do something, then repeating the same mindless optimised combo.
all of this screams of a game they knew you would buy because kubo's IP is amazing, so they put in as little funding as humanly possible. this game is worse to play than the old Ultimate Ninja Storm games, and they were riddled with balance issues, but didnt play like a clunky block-grab mess.
I had really hoped they would use spacing and reach as well as it looked like they might to balance the roster, but no luck. as per every anime, popular characters have speed, reach and safety and trade nothing for it, renji does less damage than soifon and is slower than komamura because he has range. kenpachi has tank frames but is slow, and nothing is safe on block, ibara isnt even a character, and has no shikai effects at all. giant evolutions are busted against the bad half of the roster and useless against the good few.
the reasoning behind why some finishers do 5 and some are stuck at 3 forever? nonexistant. you picked toushiro, so you get to mash the same safe combo over and over, have huge range and speed, and still only need 2 executes to win, you picked chad? sucks to be you 3-4 executes, 5 if its aisen.
even the offline stuff realises the issue. the Ai just sits there blocking until you do something, then inputs the counter until you've retried enough times to proc "idiot mode" and it just lets you win. it will NOT fight you otherwise, just twitches in front if you until you give it something to counter.
just go re-watch the anime. its not worth the money until they spend more then 5 minutes patching out the literal infinite combos they released the £50 fighting game with. a game that had literally 1 job, to have a fun fighting experience, and they didn't bother to take the time going "hang on, these moves stun for longer than it takes to reset and use them again" with their own frame data.
no doubt ill keep playing just because I dont want to believe they messed it up this badly, but i'll have to take breaks every 2nd game when I run into someone abusing the dog-tier balance and get absolutely clowned by what is little better than a bot and some youtube tabs refreshing to nuke the connection.
Imagine getting the rights to this amazing IP, right off the back of TYBW hype, and releasing the game in this state. embarrassing and shameful.