This announcement has hit me with a combination of feelings so mixed, I feel like a bartender concocting the perfect balance of hype and disappointment. Bandai Namco is back to blast fans once again with another anime video game, this time tapping into the recent resurgence of Bleach due to the Thousand Year Blood War Arc adaptation. That's right, Bleach fans rejoice and call forth your bankai as it's time to duke it out in Bleach: Rebirth of Souls... in the arena. The anime arena fighter genre, that is. A genre so creatively bankrupt that even us Jujutsu Kaisen fanboys couldn't let them slide with Cursed Clash with its incredibly transparent lack of inspiration. So many anime properties are stuck in this arena fighter formula which leads to utter disappointment once players realize it's not polished enough to rival the Ninja Storm Series, nor complex enough to be considered a real fighting game.

Normally I'd do nothing but voice my disappointment and cry hoping that Bandai Namco will one day listen to the negative feedback they receive each time they drop another formulaic game with a new cast of characters to exploit. However... the problem is this time the trailer does look kind of interesting. The animations and combat, even from the small snippets we saw, were already a million times better than anything in Cursed Clash. From a production value standpoint it seems like Bandai doesn’t want to screw this up and leave fans with the same "money-grabbing" impression from other past arena titles. That being said I'm worried that while the game may be much more visually impressive than other arena entries, there's a very slim chance that they actually innovate with the core gameplay enough to warrant praising the game. At this point we're still in the speculation stage but if I had to give an estimate based on the announcement trailer alone, I'm feeling a 6/10. Just clean enough to stand out amongst the crowd, however not deep enough to breathe life into this corpse of a genre. As a guy who enjoys a lot of characters in the Bleach cast... I really hope I'm wrong and this acts as a turning point for Bandai Namco to shell out some funds and the developers to put their damn thinking caps on for two seconds to create a fun game. 

Anime fans love their series, and companies love to exploit that affection in order to bring home some bacon without much effort. Cursed Clash represents some of the worst this business relationship has to offer, but many series have received this same lame treatment. In the future I hope we can either move toward producing more true fighting games like Dragon Ball FighterZ, or spend enough time in the oven with these arena games to truly craft them into dumb fun experiences instead of just... dumb. Are you caught up to Bleach? Did you see this announcement? Are you planning to pick this up, wait for more information, or skip it entirely? Hone your blade, channel your spiritual energy, and unleash your bankai in the comments below!