Bleach: Shattered Blade

"A Mediocre Game Based off of a Really Good Anime"

POINT OF GAME: Select your favorite Bleach character and duke it out with another Bleach character. Also, complete really easy story missions and try to unlock all the characters so you can try to have a good time with your friends at a video game based party.

GRAPHICS: Like many games based off of an anime, the graphics are pretty cheesy, mostly cel-shading while trying to make it look as real and as 3-D as possible. The character animations are decent, although apparently lacking in several places. The surrounding environments are also decent, but also lacking in good quality and detail.

SOUND: Music and sound effects are pretty good. That's the good part. Here's the bad part: I love the voice-acting in the anime, but in this game, it's okay at some points, but can get kind of annoying after a while. Some dialogue people just can't take seriously and is really bad.

CONTROLS AND PLAYABILITY: The controls are pretty immersive...like swinging your Wii Remote to swing your sword, swing the Nunchuck attachment to charge Bankai meter, control stick to move...that sort of thing. The game's playability, however, rates pretty low. All the stories of characters in Story Mode seem like something out of a bad fan fiction and thrown together at the last minute. Plus, many AI opponents are either too easy or too hard, and very few are in between.

ENTERTAINMENT: Like I said before, the story won't be that much of entertainment. One of the entertainments you can get out of this game is trying to unlock all the characters by finding some way to ignore the awful story. Another is playing this game with your friend and watching him get mad when you kick his tail by just blindly swinging the Wii Remote.

REPLAY: 2.5 out of 5
Fit to be something you should just rent. Biggest waste of $50 I've ever made (of course I got this game as I Christmas gift for my sister...who is also a big fan of the show).

THE GOOD: The game's music and sound effects are pretty good and the two-player dueling mode can be a bit entertaining. Fighting and character animations are fun to look at, too.

THE BAD: Mediocre story and mediocre graphics, even by Wii standards. Let's not forget that some of the voice-acting dialogue can get annoying after a while. The game is either way too easy or way too hard in several places and the environments the characters fight in are lacking some good quality.

THE BOTTOM-LINE: People love the Wii and people love Bleach. Both individually are fantastic. However, putting them together is a bad combination, kind of like Ice Cream with Pizza or Pop Rocks with Diet Coke. The graphics are pretty cheesy, and the playability is a bit on the weak side. The dialogue leaves a lot to be desired and the story is just terrible. However, you can't deny that this game has some redeeming qualities, like the music, sound effects and the two player matches, but unfortunately, that's not enough to lift this game out of the mediocre range. It hasn't killed my liking of the anime, but it has stopped me once and for all from buying anymore games based off of an anime.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 06/30/08

Game Release: Bleach: Shattered Blade (US, 10/09/07)