Bleach Heat The Soul 4 CSO Size: 677 MB
May 23, 2007 - For those of you who have been begging for some more Bleach action, have no fear. Bleach Heat The Soul 4, is here, but the question you should be asking is "Is it worth it?" Read to find out.Roughly 10 months after the third game of the series was released, Eighting studios returns with the fourth game. For those of you who have been living under a rock for the past few years, Bleach is the story of Ichigo Kurosaki, a fifteen year old with the abilities to see ghosts and his adventures being a Shinigami or Soul Reaper in the US dubbed.Each previous game focused specifically on a certain arc in the manga, with the third game mainly focusing on the Soul Society arc. This game continues from where that game left off except that if you've read the manga, the arc after Soul Society, which is the Bount arc in the anime, does not exist. Instead it stays true to the original plot and goes to the Arrancar arc. Sounds confusing? Lets forget the story and go straight to the game.For starters the game is user friendly. The menus are in English, though everything else is in its original Japanese language. You have the following modes to choose from: Character Master, Mission Battle, Vs. Cpu, Soul Vs. Training, Appendix, and your Options Mode. Character Master takes the place of Soul Road from Heat The Soul 3, in which you pick your character and have him battle against the computer. After each fight, you level your character up and try to have him at his max. It can be boring from time to time and you will have your daily questions about the character or a particular thing that happened in the manga. That in itself is not user-friendly unless you know Japanese.Mission Battle returns. Basically put, you go through the storyline that it is in the manga/anime to where it is at. Once again you will have to perform certain tasks in order to complete each mission, like a special move or gesture, otherwise you will be doing it over and over again.Vs. Cpu is well... what it is, fighting against the computer. You can challenge the computer in Time attack mode in which you must clear a set number of stages. Survival is to see how long you can last against the computer, free battle is picking your character and fighting against the computer for fun, and lastly is the 100 challenge survival in which you pick your character, and your opponent and must defeat him 100 times. It sounds stupid but it gets tricky. After a certain amount of fights, your opponent will get stronger, faster, and challenging.Soul Vs. is wireless play with another person who owns the game. Your training mode is also what it is. You pick any character and practice with him against the cpu. You can set the difficulty on the cpu so he can be really easy or hard.Appendix is the mode for listening to the music from the game, any art images you've unlocked during Character Master etc, and movie mode which you can unlock through Mission Battle. However... there is a nice feature to this game that doesn't appear in the previous versions. The option is convert, and what it does is your PSP will search for any previous Heat The Soul save datas from its past games. It will then read that data, convert it to the fourth game and if you're lucky, the characters that were unlockable in the previous games, can be unlocked without having the hassle to unlock them in the fourth game. You'll also get some points to use for customization.Please swing by the options also to increase the difficulty to its highest. The reason being is because if you've played the last games, the main problem with them were that they were too easy. This time however, the AI is a bit better and can sometimes give you a problem during fights against the computer and mainly in Character Master mode.So now the gameplay. In the previous games, the controlling and movement of the characters were pretty awful, this time however its different. Although the game still does lag, moving around and attacking is better, as well as the controls being more responsive. Now I'm not saying that the game is by far great. Comparing this to the likes of Tekken Dark Resurrection or Street Fighter Alpha 3 is like comparing chocolate to crap, that is Tekken and SFA being the chocolate and Bleach being the crap. Bleach does take a step in the right direction though which is good but there can be room for improvement.In all there are fifty one characters to choose from, but in reality, most of the characters are just repeats or stronger forms of certain characters, with an additional 26 helper characters to boot. The helper characters are there to give you help in battle, as in increasing defenese or speed, as well as attack. You can choose to have two helper characters for the fight, one helper character, or none but either way its there for your use. The controllers like I said previously are more responsive now, and at times the game runs at 60FPS, which although should be the speed it should be in, isn't. Instead it runs in a smoother 40-45FPS, but its not bad at least. A new noticeable feature is the guard stun; if your on the receiving end of an attack you use this method to block but at the same time send energy at your opponent to stun him, leaving him open for an attack. Be warn though, if you abuse it, so will the computer as it will use it more cheaply.The stages themselves still have this flat feeling to them but they're nice, yet vaguely detailed. Lastly your character is still in its cell-shaded gloriness... Ok they're still sharply pixelated but at least they move a bit smoother.All in all, its a decent fighting game though there are still the occasional frame rate drop and sometime lackluster difficulty. The AI has improved but sometimes certain characters are either too easy to defeat or they just don't try at all. Loading time is normal for a PSP game; there isn't much of an improvement for it but at least it isn't super slow.At the end of this, The Heat The Soul series takes a step in the right direction. With a couple more improvements in the hardware field this game may actually the best fighting game based on an manga/anime. For now though, I'll just say Heat The Soul 4 is good.
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