— #Gacha #Review —

4/6
Bleach: Brave Souls — First Impression Review

When considering new players, Bleach: Brave Souls suffers greatly just like any other gacha game that has been running for 10+ years. Going on for so long requires adding more and more content, ending up making the new-comers feel overwhelmed. Additionally, there are also issues of PVP and power-creep to consider. So, which way did this game choose to try and allow new players to jump in?

New players receive a lot of 5 and 6 star characters and a lot pull resources, and levelling the characters to the maximum level is very fast. So, players can get up to date strength-wise very fast, but this results in having to waste time bursting through hundreds of trivial stages, especially the story ones.
The game seems to have a significant focus on PVP content, but the ones I tried required to wait for weekly updates to update your player rank and therefore changing your matchmaking, meaning that it might take you multiple weeks before actually playing against players who really have characters as strong as yours.

Other huge issues of this being a 10-year-old mobage, is the fact that the UI is very bad, and slow and hard to navigate. But on top of that, the title has not been properly supported throughout the years, resulting in non-trivial loadings after EVERY single selection and in multiple different bugs. Performance and stability are really some of the lowest points of the game.
Additionally, the story is very slow and uses weirdly low resolution screenshots from the anime. If you don't know the story of Bleach, seeing this through this game sucks, and if you already know Bleach, then you don't want to waste your time with a badly made retelling of events.

Gameplay-wise, in the few weeks that I played the game I couldn't really go deep, as I didn't face players my level; I would burst through all PVE stages with the auto-battle option (available even when first doing a stage), and the tutorials are very poor. But even with the auto-battler, I had issues in farming as leveling up characters require a lot of resources but the inventory limit is very low and gets filled very fast, requiring to continuously use those resources after a few farming stages. The inventory limit can be upgraded, but it has to be done using the resource you would use for pulling characters.

The best part of this game though is the character design. I personally didn't like the chibish models in gameplay, but the general design of characters and their full art are so freaking cool.