Anime arena fighters have a track record of having a short shelf life in players' minds, in part because their gameplay tends to lack depth beyond the bread-and-butter strategies that are sussed out within the honeymoon period of their release. Tsuzuki says Rebirth of Souls will distinguish itself from the pack by incorporating the anime's intricate power systems into the DNA of its gameplay, resulting in an enthralling ebb and flow of mechanically-rich battles.
"While developing the game as a fighting action game, we delved into details from Bleach like reishi, konpaku, spiritual power, and spiritual pressure. After looking into that, we were surprised by how the worldview had been created in detail and how well those features aligned with our game concept and the fighting action genre," Tsuzuki said.
"For example, konpaku, which represents the concept of the soul in Bleach, is constructed with reishi. Drawing inspiration from that concept, we set reishi as a health gauge in the game, and players can break the konpaku to decrease reishi," he added." We introduced systems that allow players to experience reversals such as breaking konpaku with a single strike or enhancing power through transformations to facilitate breaks."
In action game layman's terms, Rebirth of Soul's combat is like a pastiche Sekiro's stagger swordplay, Tekken 7 reversals, and Smash Bros. Ultimate's stock health bar system, wherein players win battles by destroying an opponent's 9 stocks or konpaku. Although Tsuzuki referred to established action games like the Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm games,
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle R,
Tekken 7, and
Dragon Ball FighterZ when making Rebirth of Souls, Rebirth of Souls feel authentically Bleach to fans new and old.
In contrast to Sparking! Zero, whose producer hinted that the game would reflect the anime ensemble's power scaling with unbalanced battles, Rebirth of Souls characters were designed to have an equal win rate with another.
"Our game concept revolves around the reversal experience and each character is really unique, especially their zanpakuto [the weapons wielded by Bleach's Shinigami], which offers multifaceted abilities," Tsuzuki said. "Each character retains distinct features: some characters excel in speed, while others focus on heavy power, and some are good at attacking from distance.
"Additionally, each character can enhance their abilities through Awakening. In that regard, some characters are easy to handle, even for casual gamers, while others cater more [to] core action gamers," Tsuzuki added. "However, every character has the chance to reverse the situation, ensuring that all have an equal chance to win."
Although Bleach has one of the largest casts of characters in shonen anime with more personalities and power sets being introduced in
Bleach: Thousand Year Blood War, — the anime's sequel series which adapts the manga's final arc — Rebirth of Souls will only feature characters from the anime's first two story arcs, Soul Reaper and Arrancar arc.
"This is the first Bleach game that Bandai as a company is introducing and it's been a while since the last game was introduced so we thought that it would be great to introduce these characters from the original [arc] to the Arrancar time period and introduce the history of these characters, how they met, and how battles have taken place," Tsuzuki said.
) e, successivamente, con il manga.
