Game:

Bleach: Shattered Blade (2006)

Category:

Tutorial

Duration: 6:06

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20

Okay, so this is rather embarrassing...but doesn't this seem like the sort of thing that I should have uploaded first, BEFORE getting into all the characters and subjecting otherwise innocent people to all manner of battles without actually explaining much except for those who actually managed to read a couple of choice descriptions that might have had half-answers to the more obvious questions.

So I've decided to kill three birds with one stone, actually. The opening sequence, the tutorial, and this little...uh...Wii Remote Test function, all together. Mostly because alone they come nowhere near substantial enough to stand alone.

The opening is...well, for the most part ripped from the anime and sequenced together with a few stills of Arturo Plateado (oh boy, it almost looks like he belongs to the series somehow! ... ... ...you mean you don't believe them?!) and set to the game's theme song. Does the picture seem kinda...well, blue-filtered compared to the rest of the game for this, or is it just me?

I throw in a bit of the menu, and if you hadn't picked up on it already, my Menu Guide is set to Captain Retsu Unohana from Squad 4. In spite of being the "team mom" for all of the Soul Society, she is...very scary, actually. I like that a lot. And that huge nodachi that is Minazuki...I've mentioned before that unlike most female soul reapers, her specialty is officially supposed to be kendo rather than kido, which is interesting, since Squad 4 specializes in healing through spiritual power, and its captain is the best of the lot at that. If even Aizen will run from the likes of her (by herself! ...because, sorry, Isane...but you don't count), I'm extremely interested in seeing her do something besides freak out the Squad 11 members.

Training in the Tutorial is pretty basic, glossing over several of what I would consider to be big details, but all right. I want you to notice during the Bankai Attack lesson that there's a slight pause at hit 7...and then again at hit 14...and that the rapid attacks cease at hit 21, and that each of these seven-hit sequences are completely identical. This is the result of the "loop" in the finisher attacks I sometimes mention, and the attack can loop up to two additional times by shaking the Wii Remote while it's in progress. The manual is the only place this is mentioned and the computer players never make use of it, even on the hardest difficulty...very odd, anyway, so I want to harp on it as often as possible.

The last thing on the menu is the remote test...uh..."function" where you can try to figure out just how to trick the game into accepting the motions you make as...well, the motions you want your character to make. It's not exactly as hard as all that, but it's almost MORE difficult to do it when you're trying really hard...like here, in this mode, actually.

I'm going to point out that this is just an excuse to let you whomp on poor Kon with a stick. For something like that, it's actually not very satisfying or varied, especially since you have to let him re-center himself after each attack before it will read any further motions. The only naturally-occurring voice clips that you would hear here are an initial greeting (in this case "It's everybody's idol, Kon!") and various short grunts when you strike him.

That was...unbearably uninteresting, so I decided to put to use the huge number of extra clips available in his personal sound test (He's got more than twice as many as Unohana does...and he's not even a menu guide or playable character! They're all just corralled up and gathered from other Bleach games, like the DS ones), so I came up with a little scenario of my own that explains what is going on here.

Sure, it may not be up to the Tite Kubo standard, but it might pass for something less painful to endure than the Shusuke Amagai filler arc, if the viewer is feeling rather generous.

On the subject of viewer generosity...it would be for the best if you not question too deeply the decision that Kon would pretend to have mastered a Bankai known as "Fantastic Ultimate FEVER Splash"...it's just not worth the wasted neurons, and I apologize for that.

Aside from these little odds and ends, about the only thing left to explore is Episode Mode, since "Arcade Mode" is just a string of matches with no special features whatsoever.

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