Bleach: Shattered Blade

Get this: In Bleach: Shattered Blade, when you swipe the Wii Remote horizontally, your character swings their weapon horizontally. When you move it straight down in front of you, your character swings their weapon in front of them. It’s a radical idea, no? OK, no, not really; it’s about the most common sense thing imaginable, actually. But this certain degree of accuracy is something other Wii fighting games have been afraid — or perhaps too limited by their pre-existing engines — to try, and this alone makes Bleach worth a look.

Unlike many games that use the Wii’s control scheme as a way to punctuate big moments, Shattered Blade puts almost all of your attacks in the motion controls. Without hitting any buttons, you can perform the two above-mentioned hits by swinging the remote. If you want alternate attacks, you can hold down A while doing these same motions to perform unblockable strikes, or hold B while doing them to pull off special moves.

Of course, there’s more to it than just attacks — you can run in 3D with the analog stick on the Nunchuck and speed up to run superfast by holding the C button. And you can enter a Ban-kai mode where you get special powers by shaking the Nunchuck.

This video has been removed from YouTube.

There’s a decent amount of depth when you factor in counter attacks and your various on-screen gauges, but the key here is that the core movement and attack controls work well together. Within 30 seconds of playing, we were waiting for our opponent to attack, then running behind him in a split second and unleashing 10 consecutive strikes by shaking the remote back and forth. Easy.

Like other anime fighters, you can look for options in the game like a story mode, bonus story content that ties-in with the cartoon, etc. but apart from a larger than normal playable character roster (32) it all seems like pretty standard stuff. It’s the controls and the way the attacks have been created to take advantage of them that look to define the game.

We don’t want to talk up Shattered Blade too much, because in many ways it seems to be a very by the numbers anime fighter — and it’s definitely aimed at a less hardcore audience than a typical fighting game — but it’s a pleasant surprise to see a game like this clearly designed for the Wii control scheme that feels pretty solid.