Bleach: Shattered Blade

The Good: Nice art style – The combat is interesting at first...

The Bad: ...but that interest fades away after a few minutes – Repetitive gameplay will make you want to kill kittens – Looooong loading times– The music is repetitive – Lame story mode
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Bleach: Shattered Blade is the first game of the series on the wii and while i had hopes for this to become one of -if not- the best wii fighter of the year, SEGA didn't put any effort in this game making it the worst fighting game of 2007.
 
In the game you'll have control of over 20 fighters from the Beach anime universe and use both the wiimote and nunchuck for the gameplay. You wave the wiimote to slash your opponent, if you press B and wave you'll do a special attack, and if you hold A and wave you'll do a counter attack. Movement is done with the nunchuck and you can run by holding the C button; Waving the nunchuck when the energy bar is full will take you to this "super-saiyan" like mode called "bankai" where you'll have different (and more powerful) attacks and such- And that's pretty much all you do in the game, just waggle the wiimote until you kill your opponent, there's certainly a lack of depth into it and if by reading this you think it's repetitive, well... it is.

There are the basic modes you'll find in a fighting game: Vs, Arcade and a story mode called "Episode Mode" where you'll take control of one of three heroes fighting their way trough Bleach's story. There are some cutscenes during this mode but they're no more than the two characters challenging each other, and then you fight and fight and fight and then you fight some more, it could be good if the fighting wasn't so boring, repetitive and broken. Another thing that completely destroys the story mode are the looooong loading times, which are present in the entire game, just more often in this mode, they are horrible, you cant even do anything without it being loaded, it's cute at first but then it becomes absolutely annoying and painful.

The graphics are artistically nice, the character models look just like their anime counterparts and the speciall attacks look good, but other than that everything else looks horrible, much of it looks like an early PS2 game. The sound isn't very good either, the music is repetitive just like the gameplay and the voice acting is realy bad.

This game is not worth 50 $, it's not even worth 20 and for those looking for a good fighting game just look elsewhere, buy Mortal Kombat: Armaggedon or Dragon Ball Z. Budokai Tenkaichi 2 or better yet Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Budokai Tenkaichi 3. This game ends up as a big disappointment and as a whole is on par with Legend of the Dragon (and if you know that game, you'll also know it's not a very good thing to say about Bleach). For Bleach fans it's only a rental, for everyone else just don't buy it, that simple.