Game:

Bleach: Shattered Blade (2006)

Duration: 15:29

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55

This is the other request that I had mysteriously received, this time from 101Chocokitty, who wanted to see poor Momo subjected to a battle against her former captain, the nefarious Sosuke Aizen.

Apparently no slouch in terms of power and swordsmanship, Bleach fighting games seem to like to give him access to an unusually high number of kido spells as well...probably because he never seems to display any form of sword techniques in the series itself, but he has been known to use high-level kido like the Black Coffin while completely skipping the incantation.

This experience makes me rethink whether or not he's actually quite as Captain Broken as he is in the main series, though. His spells are rather effective and his counterattack special move can be devastating if applied successfully often enough, but for the most part, he seems to be just a little too calm and uninterested in the battle. His special moves leave him wide open to attack by an opponent who is actually capable of rational thought...or in other words, a human player.

So I don't feel particularly guilty about having been the one to play as Aizen...or maybe I'm rationalizing things a bit much, but I can't really say I was expecting to have such a hard time here.

Momo actually has several good things going for her as a human-controlled character, things that a computer player simply could not be taught to apply properly...short of maybe programming it to spam projectiles, but that would detract from the overall elegance of her play style...

Anyway, she has a rather fast straight projectile and a slow homing projectile, perfect for harrying even the big bad himself, because he'll be forced to evade, block, or counter every single one of them, and they're not always so nice as to line up with his own projectiles, not to mention the kind of cooldown recovery lag he experiences after he casts a spell...which, the way he does it, makes it look kinda like he's being lazy, honestly.

Another really interesting thing is that when Momo runs headlong at Aizen, it seems that she's actually too short a target to be hit by the fireballs projected by his version of the Red Flame Cannon. It happens often enough to not be a fluke, but I'm not really sure how dependable the gambit is...although it definitely pays out well, since Aizen's too lazy being a smug and self-assured magnificent bastard to do anything but stand there and take a counterattack.

Interestingly, Aizen can counter a fireball from either Tobiume or Momo's own Red Flame Cannon, and it looks absolutely hilarious when he does. This boon does not extend to cover Momo's cinematic-initiating version of the regular Tobiume projectile when in "Bankai" mode.

There was one other match left over that I couldn't add in, but it was a short curb-stomp over poor Momo, and as such not particularly interesting to watch.

I'm actually interested in finding out what the actual video upload limit is...because I know at present it's somewhere between 15:29 and 15:45, but I'm not really up for testing that on my home connection, because the upload speed is really pretty awful...I had to cut out the part with the character select screen in order to make the time limit...so sorry if you were looking forward to that.

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