Bleach: the 3rd Phantom is odd in the sense that it’s both a side story for Bleach’s story during present time (right after the Soul Society arc, at the time of release) and a flashback to Soul Society’s past, back when Urahara Kisuke was still a captain and *SPOILERS* Aizen still hasn’t shown his true colors.
The flashback delves into the story of three characters that are made specifically for the game – a pair of twins, male and female, one of which will be controlled by the player (you can choose which one to play before starting a NEW GAME), and a shinigami captain. After the flashback, the story will skip straight to the series’ current timeline and follow Ichigo and crew at Kurakura town, where they will have to deal with the consequences of things that happened during the flashback.
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If you’ve played any installment from the Super Robot Wars series of turn-based strategy role playing games (particularly the 32-bit ones), Bleach: the 3rd Phantom will be very familiar. In the interest of simplifying things, Bleach: the 3rd Phantom is basically Super Robot Wars, but instead of various mechas from a wide variety of anime and manga franchises, the game puts you in control of Bleach characters. Like most shonen animes, the power levels and fight scenes lend themselves well to turn based combat, because now you can use numbers, affinity, and a bunch of other stats to decide how powerful one character is compared to the other, while still making sense.
Graphics-wise, Bleach: The 3rd Phantom is only 2D, but it is good-looking 2D. The isometric view on the field shows the characters in their super-deformed/big-headed versions but the combat itself, when initiated, shows the characters properly proportioned. The attacks shown during combat look impressive, it would be fun watching them if it weren’t for the fact that they tend to get repetitive.
There’s one flaw with Bleach: the 3rd Phantom that prevents it from being considered as perfect, but it’s not entirely the game’s fault as it is the cumulative effect of the genre and the hardware: matches can be unnecessarily long. Units on the field move slowly, and the combat scenes, while impressive will eventually wear out their welcome. This is not really a problem as it is inherent in the genre, but on a portable designed for short bursts of playtime on the go, it seems like a mismatch. Worse, the game failed to add various options that could have sped up the game. For instance, Super Robot Wars has the option to skip combat animations. Bleach: the 3rd Phantom doesn’t. You have to watch every single fight play out, even if it consists of animation that you have already seen a hundred times before.
Still, if you do manage to look past the flaw with pacing or accept it as a quirk of the genre, Bleach: the 3rd Phantom will be a very enjoyable game, especially when you consider how helpful the ability to save in the middle of a match is. The graphics are good, the game is long enough to give you a lot of mileage as far as playtime is concerned, and it has a really good story that would have fit in well with the canon one (so even if you choose to take it as canon, it wouldn’t ruin the main storyline.)
All in all, Bleach: the 3rd Phantom is one of the better uses of the Bleach franchise, and a recommended buy for your Nintendo DS if you’re a fan of either Bleach or turn-based strategy RPGs. If you’re a fan of both, then bump up the recommendation to a “must buy.”
