Bleach: The new Arena Mode released by Brave Souls was very pleasant. However, one of its mechanics requires attention immediately.
Many fans were skeptical when the first Brave Souls Arena Mode in Bleach was announced in Klab Games. The prospect of PvP in real time appeared to fail in a game like Brave Souls. However, now that the fashion has officially begun, the general consensus among the players is overwhelmingly positive.
However, Arena Mode is not without flaws. Some of the game's characters prove far too powerful in a mode designed to allow the use of all of them. The mode's most problematic mechanic is the Score Steal, which allows teams to steal 30% of the opposing team's points while also extending the match timer by 10 seconds.
In the broadest sense, Arena Mode is real-time PvP. Instead of pitting two opposing teams in an arena, Brave Souls pits two teams against each other in different arenas to fight to destroy the majority of enemies and avoid problems with their PwP features in many other gacha games. Rival players only appear as AI-controlled bots to prevent mode from being transformed into an array of powerful attacks. Arena Mode is a fantastic fun experience, which gives many players the impression that they needed it desperately.
The Klab mode was designed to allow any character to be used by ignoring additional upgrades from other modes. Sadly, it quickly became known about a character meta. The most powerful character in the fashion proves that Masaki Kurosaki. Her supreme kit includes shields, boosts and attacks which are powerful enough to enemy AI in one shot after only a few increases in status. Klab must certainly look to certain characters during the interseasons to encourage different character options and, in particular, to ensure that the Masaki stay at the top of the stack throughout the lifetime of the mode.
It may be a problem to have the relatively stagnant pool of top-level characters, but the Score Steal mechanic really needs to be reworked. When a player reduces the score for the opponent's team to complete the Arena Missions or defeat AI bots, the player starts a Score Steal, with 30% of the opponent's score. This mechanic has been created to make returns and to prevent unilateral blowouts from dominating mode. It works the opposite way in practice. If one team has enough powerful units, it can trigger Score Steal several times before the opponents' team does it, causing a snowball winner.
Another major issue is the extension of the timer. Every Steal scoring increases the match time by ten seconds. However, it causes a lot of problems in practice. For one thing, the final seconds of the games often go back to the Score Steal as dots are traded back and forth with little rhyme or reason, which causes a team which played better than its opponents to lose because the fiveth Score Steal was missing in a row. In addition, these extended timer can add up to absurd amounts. Some players recorded matches of up to half an hour - far beyond the time limit of mode.
Arena has suffered from bugs since it was founded, with some players even preventing mode access. That said, Klab has done a good job in tackling many of these issues and compensating them adequately, making it much more player-friendly than any other anime gacha games. However, much work needs to be done to make Arena Mode the enormous draw Klab unmistakably wants. The fact that the new Grimmjow has only recently begun and needs substantial upgrades to release Arena specialty characters in its form is contentious.