In my last years of high school, Street Fighter 2 was pretty much the arcade game of choice. I remember how great a revelation its graphics and sound were coming after games like Karateka and Budokan. In the days before the Internet, we couldn’t know the full extent of its popularity or the boom in fighting games it kicked off, but we did know that we had something special in our hands. It had a variety of characters, each with different movesets. It gave each of them command-based special moves and it used six buttons to control, which I believe was unprecedented for the time. The boys in school talked about it constantly.
Due to this nostalgia, when Capcom announced that Street Fighter IV would be based not on the forgettable Street Fighter III but the classic Street Fighter II, I knew it would only be a matter of time before I got it. I knew that I would never have the time or patience to master its intricacies in the way a teenager could, and that it would be too light a game for me to be truly absorbed in, but I’d want it all the same just to be able to play around with the familiar characters at my leisure and kill the odd hour here and there with mindless bashing fun.
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As much as I’ve always liked the concept of fighting games, my reflexes and finger dexterity generally aren’t good enough for me to do well at them beyond beginner-level difficulty. Still, I’m a pretty big fan of Bleach, and I was genuinely curious enough about how the different character powers would work in a fighting game, so I decided to give the newest installment of the Heat the Soul series a try. This is actually easier said than done since this game exists only in a Japanese version, which means there are no English instructions. Since I don’t speak or read Japanese, learning my way through the game was mainly a question of trial and error. Luckily, the menu items are in English, but I had to guess what the instructions wanted me to do.
This latest installment covers the Hueco Mundo storyline in the Bleach series, which means that it features all of the Arrancar from that storyline and de-emphasizes the shinigami characters. Virtually all of the characters who were present in previous games are still here, but some of them can only be unlocked by importing a savegame from a previous version of the game. This is a shame, because those characters include such colorful ones as Kisuke Urahara, Mayuri Kurotschi and Shunsui Kyoraku. The new arrancar includes some genuinely interesting ones like Ulquiorra Schiffer and the fully released form of Grimmjow Jeagerjaques, but unfortunately also the rather silly Privaron Espada.
Continue reading A Game: Bleach Heat the Soul 5 (PSP) →
The unexamined life is a life not worth living