Bleach Brave Souls (Mobile) Review
System Mobile
Developer KLab Games Publisher KLab Games Genre Beat Em Up # of Players 1-4 Release Date January 13th, 2016 |
Pros
Plenty of ways to level your characters Huge cast of characters to collect Different events to do in game Cons Too much emphasis put on top level characters Game becomes very repetitive |
Review
by Thonos
2/19/2016
Mobile games can be hit or miss depending who you talk to. Some people enjoy them due to being readily available on your phone/tablet, quick pickup and play gameplay and are usually inexpensive or free. Others say they are cheap, repetitive and in the case of most free to play games, money grabs. While both sides have valid arguments, I do enjoy playing mobile games from time to time, usually while I'm watching TV. Bleach Brave Souls does fall into some of the pitfalls of free to play games, however I still find it a very fun game to play.
Let me start by summarizing what Bleach is. Bleach is an anime/manga series created by Tite Kubo. The protagonist of the series is Ichigo Kurosaki, an orange haired teenager who can see ghosts. Due to this, one night he runs into Rukia Kuchiki, a Soul Reaper from the Soul Society whose job is help spirits pass on while fighting Hollows, spirits who look like monsters and survive by eating other souls. In order to protect his family from an attacking Hollow, Rukia allows Ichigo to take her power so he can fight Hollows. This then leads to the rest of the story of Bleach. This is a real quick rundown on how the anime starts, and I probably butchered some that description, but this gives you an idea what the story is about.
I consider Bleach Brave Souls to be a beat em up game with RPG elements. From the main screen you can access the Story, Battles (PvP) and Co-Op Modes of the game. You can go into the shop to recruit more characters or accessories. You can go into the character menu and set up your team and power up your characters. You can also see your friends list, your inventory and your inbox. Lets cover some of these topics in more detail.
Story mode is where you are going to spend most of your time early on. The story in this game is broken into chapters and each chapter represents a story arc from the anime. (Note: I'm referencing the anime since that is what I watched, I never read the manga.) The story is told through character images and dialog while occasionally using scenes from the anime. In between these scenes you run the mission which while the mission relates to the story, some liberties were taken or else there would be very little fighting in the game. But the story with the dialog and scenes follows the anime very well and it was almost as if I was watching the anime again to an extent. One thing to note is that the game seems to follow the main story to Bleach, extra episodes and story arcs that were made for the anime are not included in this game. (Example and possible anime spoiler: The game goes right from the end of the 3rd arc to the beginning of the 6th, completely skipping the Bount arcs.) Only four chapters are available when the game launched with other ones opening up as time goes on. (As of this review the 5th chapter has opened up.)
Now would be a good time to talk about character ratings and progression. In Bleach Brave Souls there are 5 star rating levels of character rarity. Some characters only have one level while others have multiple levels. For example there is a 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 star level Ichicgo while Byakuya only has a 3 ,4 and 5 star level. The higher the star rating the more powerful the character, a 3 star Rukia is much more powerful than a 1 star Rukia. A good rule of thumb is that 1 and 2 star characters are useless, 3 star are OK early on, 4 star will get you decently far into the game, 5 star is what you want to be able to clear content completely.
On top of character rarity, each character has an affinity attached to them which is important when fighting enemies. Each character can have either a strength(red), technique(green), speed(blue), heart(purple) or spirit(orange) icon next to there portrait. Some characters have different affinities depending on there rarity and some characters can can different affinities on the same rarity (example" 3 star Momo can be either technique or spirit and they count as separate characters.) This is important to understand, when fighting enemies if they are an affinity that counters yours you will do less damage to them and they will do more damage to you. Likewise, if you counter there affinity, the reverse will happen. The game shows you what affinity counters each other and it is another interesting dynamic that I found to add a small bit of strategy to the game. It does encourage you to include different affinities on your three person team so you have options available to you.
Each mission has a affinity next to it and when possible you should select characters that counter that affinity. Before each mission you can also use in-game coins to boost some of your stats for that mission, like stamina and attack power. It is a nice option but for the story I rarely ever needed it. When you actually start the mission they all are the same, you start at the beginning of the stage, defeat groups of enemies that come at you, move to the next area, repeat until you get to the boss, finish the stage. Defeated enemies drop money, crystals and sometimes characters. Money and crystals are used to upgrade your character while you can get 1, 2, and 3 star character drops from story missions. Also doing the missions on hard mode will yield better results.
Controls are fairly simple, you use your left hand to move around the screen and use your right to attack and use your special attacks. There is no d-pad on the screen, you just put your finger on the screen and push it the direction you want to move. If you want to dodge an attack you just swipe your finger and the character will dodge in the direction you swiped. Attacking is also fairly easy, if you hold down the attack button your character will attack the closest enemy. Your special attacks will vary on your character and rarity, however they all have a cooldown between uses. You can swap between characters in your party by simply tapping there portrait. I have to say I was very impressed with the controls. On occasion I ran into an issue where my character would not move, however from my experience this only happened a few times over the course of a month of playing so I did not find this to be an issue.
At the end of each mission your characters gain experience. Each character has a max base level they can reach based on there rarity. A 1 star can reach level 20 while a 5 star can reach level 60. All characters can also be ascended four times by using other characters to strengthen them. That 1 star fully ascended can reach level 40 while a fully ascended 5 star can reach level 80. You can use ant rarity character to ascend another character but using higher rarity cards will get you more ascend points. Also using the same type of character to ascend will net you as bonus. (Example, using a Chad character to ascend a Chad character will give you more points compared to if you used a equal rarity Ichigo). Ascending characters is an important part of this game and while it can be quite expensive to ascend a 5 star character to max, the benefits are worth it.
Another way to level your character is to use crystals you collect from defeated enemies to level certain character attributes. Enemies can drop either attack, defense, stamina, focus, spirit or experience crystals. They can drop either small, medium or large versions of each. These crystals, along with coins, are then used to increase a certain attribute by a set amount of points. For example, you might use 10 small attack crystals and 600 coins to add 5 attack points to your character. By doing this you then unlock the ability in increase your defense and stamina. Every characters upgrade path looks different and this can be very costly depending on the rarity you are upgrading. Another option also is taking characters and linking them to other ones, giving them boosts to there attributes, decreasing some of there special ability cooldowns or even healing part of there health in between areas during missions. These are other examples of how you can power up your characters and it something you want to try to stay on top of if you start running into tougher enemies.
If you want to play the game with other people, Co-Op quests are an option for you. In Co-Op quest you and up to three other people play through a mission that will yield experience, crystals, money and sometimes accessories, items that can be added to your character to increase your attributes. Besides using Spirit Orbs (more on these later), this is the only way to get accessories. You can create a public or private room or join another players room. You can communicate using a list of premade phrases. When you are doing the mission, you play as your leader character. I have not done many Co-Op missions but the ones I have done I have had little problems with.
If you rather fight other players, there are 3 v 3 PvP battles. When doing PvP in this game, you select your 3 character team and you pick from a list of other teams mostly matched by your average attack strength and ranking. You can refresh the list for a very small coin fee to try to get a better match up. Before each fight you can choose to boost your attributes and point modifier for a small fee which I have been doing a lot as of late. When you start the fight you do not control your characters, the game does that for you. The only thing you can do is after a certain point and spirit orb pops up on screen and if your team happens to get it you can choose which characters special ability gets used. Winning the match nets you points that increases your rankings while losing still gives you a small amount of points. Every Sunday the rankings get tallied and depending on your rank and bracket, you get special coins which can be used to buy large crystals or 5 star characters. The PvP battles are alright and it does encourage playing daily, if you don't keep within a certain point range each week you can fall down a bracket.
The game also runs events daily and weekly. Daily events allow you to do missions strictly to farm a particular crystal or coins depending what day it is while another one only happens two hours a day to farm experience crystals. Most events last a week or two and these allow you to get new 3 or 4 star characters. Other events do not involve missions but instead give you a chance to get special event 4 and 5 star characters with spirit orbs. These events and promotions is the games way to keep you coming back so you do not stop playing. So far there have been enough of them going on to keep my interest.
When you are doing Co-Op missions and PvP battles, you are going to run into other players (PvP they can look at your team before battles). Sometimes you will get a friend request from these players or you might want to send a request to someone you know. There are two advantages to making friends in this game. One is that when doing story/event missions, you can select the leader character of your friend to join you in the mission to fight the boss character. This can make a huge difference if you are struggling to beat a stage and you have a friend who has a max level 4 or 5 star character that counters the affinity of the boss you are fighting. There is a cooldown between uses and you usually have to wait a few hours before you use that friend's character again. Also, when some one uses your character or you use theirs you get friend points and these points can be used to get random items like crystals and money.
The game uses two types of currency to regulate your game time. Soul Tickets are used anytime you start a story or event mission or create a co-op room. You get 5 to start and can get extra ones from daily login rewards or completing a daily PvP quest. If you go below 5 soul tickets it takes 15 minutes to get one back. On average I was able to go through 6 tickets during a normal play through session. Battle tickets work slightly different in that you only get 5 per day. You also get 5 for completing a daily story quest. For both Soul and Battle tickets if you do not want to wait you can use spirit orbs to but more tickets immediately, something that I would never recommend.
Spirit Orbs have been mentioned quite a lot during this review. That is because they are the games main currency. You get orbs multiple ways. Early on completing a story mission for the first time, each of the missions three challenges and completing all three challenges each reward you with a spirit orb is the fastest way to get them. Doing event missions follows the same guidelines. Also, fully leveling characters (max level and ascended level) will net you a set amount of spirit orbs based on the characters rarity. Also running Co-Op missions with random people will get you a spirit orb for each random person you run with up to 300 orbs. Login bonus and patches also give you orbs. You can also buy orbs with real money, this is how the game makes its money. While it may seem like you get a lot of orbs from just playing the game, and you do, this is still a game that at some point you are going to clear all the content and the rate at which you get orbs will slow down. Over my play through of the game I have put at most $20 into the game and I had no problem with that.
Graphically this game looks very well done. While the stages look alright, the characters and enemies look decently detailed. The game also sounds good from the music down to the sound effects. Running the game on my tablet I never had any slowdown or issues running the game. The only two issues that I had was that rarely when I was loading a mission the game would close for no apparent reason. This was a minor issue, all I did was launch the game again and picked up while I left off, I never had the game crash during an actual mission. The other was that the load times when loading a mission seemed to take longer than it should. Again, not a big deal just something that I noticed.
While I have a lot of nice things to say about the game, this game does suffer from issues. First off this is a very repetitive game. Often I found myself running the same mission 4 or 5 times in a row just to level up characters or try and farm 3 star characters so I could ascend my 5 stars. Also, another issue is that once you run out of a steady stream of spirit orbs, getting new 4 and 5 star cards can be pretty difficult unless you put money into the game to buy orbs. It takes 25 orbs to summon one 3 star or above character and 250 orbs to do a 10 character pull with the guarantee that at least one of the 10 characters is going to be a 4 star or higher. Outside the PvP rewards which can take up to 8 weeks to get and the one free 5 star you get early on, this is the only way to get 5 star characters. And it is all random, you can spend 1000 orbs and get no 5 star cards or spend 100 and get two. There is also no way to tell what character you are going to get so if you are after a certain character you may never see them come up.
I feel the biggest problem is that the game has a huge emphasis on 5 star cards. Almost to the point that unless you get at least three to form a full team you are going to have a hard time being competitive in PvP or completing the story missions on hard. Granted this is probably done on purpose so people will spend money on orbs try to get them. But since the game is so random with this, you could put $50 into orbs, do pulls with the orbs and only get 3 star characters. My experience has been decent, I went through about 775 orbs until I got my first 5 star character (White Ichigo) besides the free Renji everyone gets. After that I started only doing single pulls and I ended getting a 5 star Orihime and a 5 star Ulquiorra within 150 orbs of each other. Those two combined with the White Ichigo has given me a fairly good 5 star team. I also got a 5 star Nelliel from the Valentines event earlier this month. But my experience is one of many, and I have heard of others going longer stretches and getting nothing.
Overall I have enjoyed Bleach Brave Souls and I can say I will continue to keep playing this game. This game does have some flaws and to be fair if I had not gotten the 5 star characters that I did I am not sure how much fun I would be having. The game is repetitive, but that is something I expected going into this game. The game looks and sounds good and currently with the events going on there is always something to do. While you do not need to be a fan of Bleach, it does help. Actually, because of this game I went back to watch some of my favorite episodes of the anime.
by Thonos
2/19/2016
Mobile games can be hit or miss depending who you talk to. Some people enjoy them due to being readily available on your phone/tablet, quick pickup and play gameplay and are usually inexpensive or free. Others say they are cheap, repetitive and in the case of most free to play games, money grabs. While both sides have valid arguments, I do enjoy playing mobile games from time to time, usually while I'm watching TV. Bleach Brave Souls does fall into some of the pitfalls of free to play games, however I still find it a very fun game to play.
Let me start by summarizing what Bleach is. Bleach is an anime/manga series created by Tite Kubo. The protagonist of the series is Ichigo Kurosaki, an orange haired teenager who can see ghosts. Due to this, one night he runs into Rukia Kuchiki, a Soul Reaper from the Soul Society whose job is help spirits pass on while fighting Hollows, spirits who look like monsters and survive by eating other souls. In order to protect his family from an attacking Hollow, Rukia allows Ichigo to take her power so he can fight Hollows. This then leads to the rest of the story of Bleach. This is a real quick rundown on how the anime starts, and I probably butchered some that description, but this gives you an idea what the story is about.
I consider Bleach Brave Souls to be a beat em up game with RPG elements. From the main screen you can access the Story, Battles (PvP) and Co-Op Modes of the game. You can go into the shop to recruit more characters or accessories. You can go into the character menu and set up your team and power up your characters. You can also see your friends list, your inventory and your inbox. Lets cover some of these topics in more detail.
Story mode is where you are going to spend most of your time early on. The story in this game is broken into chapters and each chapter represents a story arc from the anime. (Note: I'm referencing the anime since that is what I watched, I never read the manga.) The story is told through character images and dialog while occasionally using scenes from the anime. In between these scenes you run the mission which while the mission relates to the story, some liberties were taken or else there would be very little fighting in the game. But the story with the dialog and scenes follows the anime very well and it was almost as if I was watching the anime again to an extent. One thing to note is that the game seems to follow the main story to Bleach, extra episodes and story arcs that were made for the anime are not included in this game. (Example and possible anime spoiler: The game goes right from the end of the 3rd arc to the beginning of the 6th, completely skipping the Bount arcs.) Only four chapters are available when the game launched with other ones opening up as time goes on. (As of this review the 5th chapter has opened up.)
Now would be a good time to talk about character ratings and progression. In Bleach Brave Souls there are 5 star rating levels of character rarity. Some characters only have one level while others have multiple levels. For example there is a 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 star level Ichicgo while Byakuya only has a 3 ,4 and 5 star level. The higher the star rating the more powerful the character, a 3 star Rukia is much more powerful than a 1 star Rukia. A good rule of thumb is that 1 and 2 star characters are useless, 3 star are OK early on, 4 star will get you decently far into the game, 5 star is what you want to be able to clear content completely.
On top of character rarity, each character has an affinity attached to them which is important when fighting enemies. Each character can have either a strength(red), technique(green), speed(blue), heart(purple) or spirit(orange) icon next to there portrait. Some characters have different affinities depending on there rarity and some characters can can different affinities on the same rarity (example" 3 star Momo can be either technique or spirit and they count as separate characters.) This is important to understand, when fighting enemies if they are an affinity that counters yours you will do less damage to them and they will do more damage to you. Likewise, if you counter there affinity, the reverse will happen. The game shows you what affinity counters each other and it is another interesting dynamic that I found to add a small bit of strategy to the game. It does encourage you to include different affinities on your three person team so you have options available to you.
Each mission has a affinity next to it and when possible you should select characters that counter that affinity. Before each mission you can also use in-game coins to boost some of your stats for that mission, like stamina and attack power. It is a nice option but for the story I rarely ever needed it. When you actually start the mission they all are the same, you start at the beginning of the stage, defeat groups of enemies that come at you, move to the next area, repeat until you get to the boss, finish the stage. Defeated enemies drop money, crystals and sometimes characters. Money and crystals are used to upgrade your character while you can get 1, 2, and 3 star character drops from story missions. Also doing the missions on hard mode will yield better results.
Controls are fairly simple, you use your left hand to move around the screen and use your right to attack and use your special attacks. There is no d-pad on the screen, you just put your finger on the screen and push it the direction you want to move. If you want to dodge an attack you just swipe your finger and the character will dodge in the direction you swiped. Attacking is also fairly easy, if you hold down the attack button your character will attack the closest enemy. Your special attacks will vary on your character and rarity, however they all have a cooldown between uses. You can swap between characters in your party by simply tapping there portrait. I have to say I was very impressed with the controls. On occasion I ran into an issue where my character would not move, however from my experience this only happened a few times over the course of a month of playing so I did not find this to be an issue.
At the end of each mission your characters gain experience. Each character has a max base level they can reach based on there rarity. A 1 star can reach level 20 while a 5 star can reach level 60. All characters can also be ascended four times by using other characters to strengthen them. That 1 star fully ascended can reach level 40 while a fully ascended 5 star can reach level 80. You can use ant rarity character to ascend another character but using higher rarity cards will get you more ascend points. Also using the same type of character to ascend will net you as bonus. (Example, using a Chad character to ascend a Chad character will give you more points compared to if you used a equal rarity Ichigo). Ascending characters is an important part of this game and while it can be quite expensive to ascend a 5 star character to max, the benefits are worth it.
Another way to level your character is to use crystals you collect from defeated enemies to level certain character attributes. Enemies can drop either attack, defense, stamina, focus, spirit or experience crystals. They can drop either small, medium or large versions of each. These crystals, along with coins, are then used to increase a certain attribute by a set amount of points. For example, you might use 10 small attack crystals and 600 coins to add 5 attack points to your character. By doing this you then unlock the ability in increase your defense and stamina. Every characters upgrade path looks different and this can be very costly depending on the rarity you are upgrading. Another option also is taking characters and linking them to other ones, giving them boosts to there attributes, decreasing some of there special ability cooldowns or even healing part of there health in between areas during missions. These are other examples of how you can power up your characters and it something you want to try to stay on top of if you start running into tougher enemies.
If you want to play the game with other people, Co-Op quests are an option for you. In Co-Op quest you and up to three other people play through a mission that will yield experience, crystals, money and sometimes accessories, items that can be added to your character to increase your attributes. Besides using Spirit Orbs (more on these later), this is the only way to get accessories. You can create a public or private room or join another players room. You can communicate using a list of premade phrases. When you are doing the mission, you play as your leader character. I have not done many Co-Op missions but the ones I have done I have had little problems with.
If you rather fight other players, there are 3 v 3 PvP battles. When doing PvP in this game, you select your 3 character team and you pick from a list of other teams mostly matched by your average attack strength and ranking. You can refresh the list for a very small coin fee to try to get a better match up. Before each fight you can choose to boost your attributes and point modifier for a small fee which I have been doing a lot as of late. When you start the fight you do not control your characters, the game does that for you. The only thing you can do is after a certain point and spirit orb pops up on screen and if your team happens to get it you can choose which characters special ability gets used. Winning the match nets you points that increases your rankings while losing still gives you a small amount of points. Every Sunday the rankings get tallied and depending on your rank and bracket, you get special coins which can be used to buy large crystals or 5 star characters. The PvP battles are alright and it does encourage playing daily, if you don't keep within a certain point range each week you can fall down a bracket.
The game also runs events daily and weekly. Daily events allow you to do missions strictly to farm a particular crystal or coins depending what day it is while another one only happens two hours a day to farm experience crystals. Most events last a week or two and these allow you to get new 3 or 4 star characters. Other events do not involve missions but instead give you a chance to get special event 4 and 5 star characters with spirit orbs. These events and promotions is the games way to keep you coming back so you do not stop playing. So far there have been enough of them going on to keep my interest.
When you are doing Co-Op missions and PvP battles, you are going to run into other players (PvP they can look at your team before battles). Sometimes you will get a friend request from these players or you might want to send a request to someone you know. There are two advantages to making friends in this game. One is that when doing story/event missions, you can select the leader character of your friend to join you in the mission to fight the boss character. This can make a huge difference if you are struggling to beat a stage and you have a friend who has a max level 4 or 5 star character that counters the affinity of the boss you are fighting. There is a cooldown between uses and you usually have to wait a few hours before you use that friend's character again. Also, when some one uses your character or you use theirs you get friend points and these points can be used to get random items like crystals and money.
The game uses two types of currency to regulate your game time. Soul Tickets are used anytime you start a story or event mission or create a co-op room. You get 5 to start and can get extra ones from daily login rewards or completing a daily PvP quest. If you go below 5 soul tickets it takes 15 minutes to get one back. On average I was able to go through 6 tickets during a normal play through session. Battle tickets work slightly different in that you only get 5 per day. You also get 5 for completing a daily story quest. For both Soul and Battle tickets if you do not want to wait you can use spirit orbs to but more tickets immediately, something that I would never recommend.
Spirit Orbs have been mentioned quite a lot during this review. That is because they are the games main currency. You get orbs multiple ways. Early on completing a story mission for the first time, each of the missions three challenges and completing all three challenges each reward you with a spirit orb is the fastest way to get them. Doing event missions follows the same guidelines. Also, fully leveling characters (max level and ascended level) will net you a set amount of spirit orbs based on the characters rarity. Also running Co-Op missions with random people will get you a spirit orb for each random person you run with up to 300 orbs. Login bonus and patches also give you orbs. You can also buy orbs with real money, this is how the game makes its money. While it may seem like you get a lot of orbs from just playing the game, and you do, this is still a game that at some point you are going to clear all the content and the rate at which you get orbs will slow down. Over my play through of the game I have put at most $20 into the game and I had no problem with that.
Graphically this game looks very well done. While the stages look alright, the characters and enemies look decently detailed. The game also sounds good from the music down to the sound effects. Running the game on my tablet I never had any slowdown or issues running the game. The only two issues that I had was that rarely when I was loading a mission the game would close for no apparent reason. This was a minor issue, all I did was launch the game again and picked up while I left off, I never had the game crash during an actual mission. The other was that the load times when loading a mission seemed to take longer than it should. Again, not a big deal just something that I noticed.
While I have a lot of nice things to say about the game, this game does suffer from issues. First off this is a very repetitive game. Often I found myself running the same mission 4 or 5 times in a row just to level up characters or try and farm 3 star characters so I could ascend my 5 stars. Also, another issue is that once you run out of a steady stream of spirit orbs, getting new 4 and 5 star cards can be pretty difficult unless you put money into the game to buy orbs. It takes 25 orbs to summon one 3 star or above character and 250 orbs to do a 10 character pull with the guarantee that at least one of the 10 characters is going to be a 4 star or higher. Outside the PvP rewards which can take up to 8 weeks to get and the one free 5 star you get early on, this is the only way to get 5 star characters. And it is all random, you can spend 1000 orbs and get no 5 star cards or spend 100 and get two. There is also no way to tell what character you are going to get so if you are after a certain character you may never see them come up.
I feel the biggest problem is that the game has a huge emphasis on 5 star cards. Almost to the point that unless you get at least three to form a full team you are going to have a hard time being competitive in PvP or completing the story missions on hard. Granted this is probably done on purpose so people will spend money on orbs try to get them. But since the game is so random with this, you could put $50 into orbs, do pulls with the orbs and only get 3 star characters. My experience has been decent, I went through about 775 orbs until I got my first 5 star character (White Ichigo) besides the free Renji everyone gets. After that I started only doing single pulls and I ended getting a 5 star Orihime and a 5 star Ulquiorra within 150 orbs of each other. Those two combined with the White Ichigo has given me a fairly good 5 star team. I also got a 5 star Nelliel from the Valentines event earlier this month. But my experience is one of many, and I have heard of others going longer stretches and getting nothing.
Overall I have enjoyed Bleach Brave Souls and I can say I will continue to keep playing this game. This game does have some flaws and to be fair if I had not gotten the 5 star characters that I did I am not sure how much fun I would be having. The game is repetitive, but that is something I expected going into this game. The game looks and sounds good and currently with the events going on there is always something to do. While you do not need to be a fan of Bleach, it does help. Actually, because of this game I went back to watch some of my favorite episodes of the anime.