Even back in the era of the low effort tie in, every now and then, however, you’d get the odd licensed game that at least attempted to go above and beyond and be a compelling game and product on its own merits that could feasibly appeal to players who weren’t already fans of the property the game was based on to begin with.

Bleach: Rebirth of Souls is in the lineage of those titles – while it is still an arena fighter based on one of the most recognizable anime of all time, it isn’t merely coasting on the built-in fanbase and audience that Bleach has, and is trying (operative word “trying” here) to be a robust and full-featured, well playing game in its own right.

Credit has to be given to developers Tamsoft here. It would be far too simple to get away with a straightforward arena fighter and call it a day. However, they have fleshed out the combat system in the game to where it is genuinely, legitimately compelling and fun enough to play that even someone who is not interested in Bleach – or even anime – at all would probably enjoy playing it merely as a fighting game, with no knowledge of the source material at all.

"They have fleshed out the combat system in the game to where it is genuinely, legitimately compelling and fun enough to play that even someone who is not interested in Bleach – or even anime – at all would probably enjoy playing it merely as a fighting game, with no knowledge of the source material at all."

That combat system draws a lot of inspiration from a lot of other games, with a frenetic, dynamic pace of combat mixing basic light and heavy attacks that can be strung into quick and effective combos, a lot of kinetic movement and positioning, signature finisher moves (that are a great source for fan pleasing references to the source material), and a stock system that, by keeping the amount of lives your attacks take from your opponent on each knockout variable, keeps fights thrilling and engaging.

Legitimately, Bleach: Rebirth of Souls is a fun fighting game. Almost every single fight I had felt like one where I had to fight to claim the win, and there are enough special moves, counters, and abilities that all characters have on them at any given time that even an early hefty lead doesn’t guarantee victory, and letting your guard down for even a little bit can give opponents the opening they need to stage a comeback. If you are a fan of arena fighters, Bleach: Rebirth of Souls can lay claim to being one of the best ones around, very much in the same vein as last year’s similarly good Dragon Ball Sparking Zero.

Rebirth of Souls also has a sizeable roster of characters, and while I haven’t gone hands on with every single of the literally dozens of characters the title boasts, the ones I have player all play differently, while still feeling viable enough to hold their own against pretty much any character they’re matched up with.

There have definitely been some match ups I have found harder than expected, but what has convinced me of this game’s mechanical soundness has been that, unlike so many other games of this ilk, it has almost always been simply a matter of getting used to the opponent’s moves and speed, getting a read on them, and then adjusting my own attacks accordingly, to clinch victory. This is truly a really engaging fighter that fans and non-fans alike can dig their teeth into; the former to recreate some of their favorite fights themselves, and the latter simply because of how mechanically engaging and dense this game is.

Fans are, paradoxically enough, likely to be the group that finds the most to complain about in this release. For as great as the combat and fighting in this game are, the story mode is shockingly subpar, and really stands in sharp contrast to how much attention and care the rest of theme seems to have. As mentioned previously, it tries to follow the story of Bleach (at least through to the Arrancar arc) in a visual novel format (interspersed with fights), and it is… not good.

The entire affair feels extremely low budget, with barely animated character models yammering away for what feels like interminable lengths of time, against sparse seeming backdrops and voice acting that can feel weirdly poor and disconnected. While credit has to be given to Namco for actually bothering with an English dub for the game (again, a lot of these releases forego a dub entirely), the voice direction is not great, and the voice acting can feel grating at times. There are exceptions – shout out to Jonny Bosch Yong as Ichigo, obviously – but other than that, the English voices can often feel lacking. Of course, a lot of fans will choose to play with Japanese voices to begin with, in which case the voice work doesn’t feel as subpar, but all the other criticisms for the storytelling still apply.

"For as great as the combat and fighting in this game are, the story mode is shockingly subpar, and really stands in sharp contrast to how much attention and care the rest of theme seems to have."

The reason I am hard on the story mode is that in the past, I have often found anime game adaptations to be gateways into the anime itself. Long before I ever even watched Dragon Ball, I was fully familiar with the characters, world, story, iconography, and more, because of how many games adapted the story extremely well (shout out to the amazing Legacy of Goku games on the GBA). In other words, I truly believe that these story modes can often act as a great primer for the source material, bringing, potentially, new fans on board.

But the story mode needs to be high effort for that – both the story and the storytelling need to feel consequential enough that you are invested in what is going on and where it is going. Fans are obviously going to care because it’s a story they already love. The missed chance here is the story mode not being good enough to make the story of Bleach, which is obviously engaging and captivating enough to have created a whole generation of fans, seem good enough.

So yes, you’re not going together new fans of Bleach being made because of this game. What you might get are fans of this game itself. While the story mode is truly, truly a missed opportunity, the actual fighting and combat are so well done that this is very much a game worth playing even if you have no interest in the source material (as long as you like fighting games, in any case).

The shortcomings and cut corners are obvious, and it is easy to decry what this game is not – if only it wasn’t another arena fighter! If only the story mode wasn’t done so poorly! – however, doing that also potentially misses attributing the credit to this game that it obviously deserves in so many areas. Bleach: Rebirth of Souls is still a very flawed game, much like most other anime adaptations are – but its highs are much higher, and that gives me hope for a potential follow-up down the line that truly does Justin to this property, and gives it the adaptation that it deserves. Hopefully, it will be the good folks at Tamsoft who bring that to us.

This game was reviewed on PlayStation 5.

Based on the popular and long-running Japanese manga of the same name, Captain Tsubasa: Rise of New Champions is an absolutely bonkers representation of the beautiful game that encourages you – hell, even nags at you – to stop worrying about fouls and penalties, about making mazy runs on the wings, about setting up the perfect cross, and tells you to just let loose in its world of arcade-y, over-the-top football. And when you’re on the pitch, the result is an enjoyable game based on a sport that has been pigeonholed into the simulation genre for well over a decade.

The focus here is on keeping the action fast-moving at all times, so the game encourages you to do things that you wouldn’t ordinarily want to do in a football game, like running to a striker at full speed and tackling him from behind with reckless abandon, or taking a shot on goal with maximum shot power from the halfway line. Just as an example, how you go about scoring a goal in Captain Tsubasa is quite different from how you’d ordinarily do it in most other football games. Goalkeepers have a spirit meter, and every time they save a shot, that meter drains, and how much of it is drained varies based on how powerful your shot was. The best way to score a goal, then, is to whittle their spirit meter down as much as possible to ensure that the next shot you take won’t be one they can save, which means you’re constantly taking shots throughout the course of the match. That doesn’t mean that’s the only way to score a goal, of course- particularly good shots can find the back of the net even against a goalkeeper with a healthy spirit meter. But that doesn’t happen too often.

"Captain Tsubasa: Rise of New Champions not only encourages you to keep doing these things, like far-flung shots on goal from impossible positions and crunching tackles that would get you sent off in a heartbeat in a real football game, it also rewards you for them."

Captain Tsubasa: Rise of New Champions not only encourages you to keep doing these things, like far-flung shots on goal from impossible positions and crunching tackles that would get you sent off in a heartbeat in a real football game, it also rewards you for them. Most tackles, for instance, result in you stealing the ball from the opposition, which means winning possession back and building up another attack is easy- but by that same token, that holds true for the opposing team as well.

The underlying mechanics in Captain Tsubasa are fairly simplistic. Stripped down to its bones, it might be a perceived as a game that’s lacking mechanical depth, but the real enjoyment comes from the gleefully silly way it presents them to the players. Special moves – such as crunching tackles, slipping past oncoming defenders with perfect timing, cracking shots from a distance, last-ditch blocks of devastating shots – trigger mini-cutscenes.

The camera immediately zooms in from your regular action to show off these brief moments, and then puts you right back into the game. What helps is that there’s a solid amount of variety with these special cutscenes, and which one gets triggered and when one gets triggered depends entirely on what’s going on on the pitch- which, of course, is entirely up to you as a player, like blocking a specific kind of shot with a specific defender, or letting a shot loose after successfully dribbling and dodging past two opposing players in quick succession.

"The underlying mechanics in Captain Tsubasa are fairly simplistic. Stripped down to its bones, it might be a perceived as a game that’s lacking mechanical depth, but the real enjoyment comes from the gleefully silly way it presents them to the players."

Of course, given Captain Tsubasa’s emphasis on flair and arcade-y fun over mechanical depth, there are some issues that are hard to ignore. Dribbling for instance, is far too simplistic and restrictive, and doesn’t allow you to build up attacks very well. Teammate AI is also not the best, and I can’t tell you how many times I was waiting for them to make the most painfully obvious runs into empty spaces, only to watch them just mill about restlessly in the same spot. Penalties are also a bit too simplified, to the extent that they more or less become a guessing game. All of these issues ensure that Captain Tsubasa is a game best enjoyed in short bursts rather than over prolonged sessions of gameplay.

Clearly, the game’s biggest strengths are on the pitch – as they should be – but the story modes don’t seem to understand that. There are two separate campaigns on offer. There’s Episode: Tsubasa – which sees you playing as the titular Tsubasa Oozora and his teammates as they try and win the Nationals for a third year in a row – and Episode: New Hero – which allows you to create your own custom character from scratch and craft your own custom story and journey, starting in one of three school teams and progressing all the way up to the international level.

Both of these campaigns – especially Episode: Tsubasa – seem oddly reluctant to let you do what you’re her to do- play football. In Episode: Tsubasa, between all matches, there are torturously prolonged periods of storytelling where characters ramble on and on about things that don’t matter. Fans of the manga will appreciate a lot of the interactions here, I’m sure, but storytelling here is done through static and awkward cutscenes, and the writing is predictably sloppy- seriously, characters go from being deplorable rivals on opposing teams who defile the spirit of the sport before kick off, to suddenly doing a complete 180, humbly accepting their losses, and cheering Tsubasa on as soon as their team loses. And it happens again and again.

"In Episode: Tsubasa, between all matches, there are torturously prolonged periods of storytelling where characters ramble on and on about things that don’t matter."

Episode: New Hero does stave off these issues to some degree, given the fact that a lot of the time between matches is spent on things that make an actual mechanical difference, such as choosing which characters to interact with and grow your friendships with in order to learn new skills- but there’s plenty of long stretches of clumsy and uninteresting storytelling here as well. Thankfully, you can skip most cutscenes and just keep mashing X to skip the absolute barrage of dialogue boxes to get back to the good stuff (relatively) quickly, while outside of the campaigns, you can always jump into a quick match, whether solo or multiplayer, if you just want a quick game of bizarro football.

Captain Tsubasa: Rise of New Champions is not a perfect game, and it’s not the most mechanically dense game, but thankfully, it doesn’t have to be. Its strengths lie in its unhinged, over-the-top on-pitch action and its delightfully silly presentation. If you’re looking for a football game that lets you focus on all the fun aspects of the sport while ignoring almost everything to do with tactics and strategy, this is the game for you.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 4.