Likely surprising no one considering the popularity of the Bleach manga/anime series, Sega announced its plans to publish Bleach: Dark Souls (or Bleach DS: 2nd Kokui Hirameku Requiem, as it's known in Japan), the follow-up to Bleach: The Blade of Fate, this summer in North America.
The Treasure-developed 2D fighter features a number of improvements on the original:
an exclusive storyline that takes place in between the series's first and second season
44 playable characters (The Blade of Fate has 26)
30 new Power-up Cards and Power Crystals
Bleach encyclopedia containing "fun and interesting facts about the entire Bleach universe"
All that comes on top of the game's four-player online battles and multi-plane stages. Hit the gallery below for English-translated screenshots from Dark Souls, or check past the break for a two-minute trailer from the Japanese release.
Got a few minutes to kill? Spend it killing with your fists of stylus-enhanced rage. Spike has created a Flash demo of the Fist of the North Star game and made it available at the official website, allowing you to first enjoy a tutorial that demonstrates the controls, and then, as Kenshiro, take on some enormous guy in a fight. Just click around the navigation buttons under the DS on the demo page and you'll get to all the content.
The tutorial isn't terribly necessary -- click numbers in order, drag back and forth between lines pointing at each other -- but we recommend it, because it basically amounts to a little bit more game. There's a decent challenge to be found in some of the tasks, mostly because of the timer. The back-and-forth motions, for example, require some decent speed and accuracy. Of course, this is made somewhat more difficult by the substitution of a mouse for the stylus.
Shion no Ou is a manga and anime series about a girl who sees her parents murdered, then watches as the murderer walks off with the "king" piece from the family's shogi board. She subsequently begins playing shogi in order to find the killer. Over time, the mute (from trauma) Shion begins enjoying the game, while continuing to search for clues about the shogi-playing killer's identity.
Sounds like a neat premise for a manga, but also the basis for a weirdly intense shogi game. It is targeted directly at the intersection between the board game, murder-mystery and junior-high drama crowds. Oh, and of course it includes a "learn to play shogi" mode, so go ahead and add the DS training game enthusiasts to the list!
Capcom has released a trailer of their game adaptation of the conceptually wacky manga series Rosario + Vampire (Rosario and the Vampire). As you'd expect for a game based on manga and anime, the trailer spends most of its time showing some anime footage, then fits some actual gameplay in at the end.
Past the adventure-game-style location searching, past the cutscene of the poor protagonist being bitten by his vampire girlfriend (what did he expect?) and past the clicking-on-floating-hearts minigame, you can catch a glimpse of the unusual touchscreen-based combat. On the bottom screen, it looks just like an Ouendan-type thing. On the top, it's a 2D fighting game!
Good to see that the official Doki Doki Majo Shinpanmanga, which has been collected into trade paperback form, stays true to the series' hallmarks. It is in fact a manga about a guy compelled by an angel-thing to go poke girls until they reveal themselves as witches.
It's significantly more unsettling in the manga, because, while it lacks the agency of the games (you're watching girls get poked instead of taking part), the ways in which these poor girls get messed with falls outside of the limitations of the game. One girl is stuck in a gigantic spider web, for example, and another has her Neo Geo Pocket knocked out of her hands by her own breasts when Lulu the "angel" begins harrassing her.
Further demonstrating the insane success of our favorite lawyer adventure game series, Del Rey Manga, publisher of Avril Lavigne's Make 5 Wishes, will be translating the official Gyakuten Saibanmanga and releasing it in the U.S. The first volume of Phoenix Wright is set to be released on August 26th, at a retail price of $13.95. Amazon, of course, is preselling it for $2 less.
The manga features all the familiar Phoenix Wright characters you know, love, and object to, along with new characters, in completely new cases. With Apollo Justice on the way next month, we're glad to have a line on some new content, even if it's somewhat less interactive than the games.
The DS's touchscreen technology has allowed us to indulge in some truly unique activities, from painting tanks to DJing to slapping women. Seriously, who would have guessed this kind of thing was the future in 2003?
Not wishing to be left out, Capcom's Rosario + Vampire (which, Capcom has confirmed, won't be appearing in the west) also uses the touchscreen in a novel way. Rather than the traditional method of pressing buttons, the game's combat sequences are carried out with directional stylus swipes, with different Ouendan-esque strokes producing certain moves.
It's definitely an interesting approach, and it makes us wonder whether we'll be seeing more fighting games embracing this method in the future. If Rosario + Vampire pulls it off well, we wouldn't bet against another developer picking up this idea and running with it.
We thought this minigame in the Fist of the North Star DS game was awesome enough to warrant its own post. As the latest screenshot update on the official website illustrates, Raoh's storyline is playable in addition to Kenshiro's.
This follows outside of the main game as well, with this Raoh-spotting minigame. We've seen someweirdminigames in our tenure as DS fans, but this one may manage to be the freakiest yet. Given a selection of four details from manga panels, you are asked to pick which depiction of Raoh features Raoh crying over his brother Toki. That's actually not the whole of the game; it's a wireless multiplayer trivia game, which is a neat addition. Still, for us it's always going to be the crying-Raoh game.
Lest you think Raoh is weak, we should tell you why he's crying over his brother Toki: it's because he has just punched Toki almost to death, and is about to punch him all the way to death. You'd cry too.
There's something about stylus controls and Fist of the North Star that go so well together. Despite the animation being sub-par in the anime, we still enjoyed it very much (but don't even get us started on the live-action film) back in the day, so the prospect of being able to play it on our DS is one we've been in favor of for a bit now. Oh, how we can't wait to hit some fools with about a billion punches.
These newest screens mix in a couple oldies with all of the others, so keep that in mind. For the most part, though, it's all fresh.
To-Love-Ru is a play on the Japanese pronunciation of the English words "trouble" (toraburu) and "love" (rabu). Unfortunately, the pun just doesn't fit native English phonology as well; to put a finer point on it, "tlovel" isn't all that funny or clever-sounding. Too bad. It's pretty neat that a pun on English words only works in another language's sound system, though, right?
Anyway, To-Love-Ru is also a manga/anime property that is being made into a DS game by Marvelous Entertainment. The manga is about a high-school boy, Rito, who gets involved with some alien princess thing and hilarity and awkward social situations ensue -- your basic manga stuff. What is interesting to us is how Marvelous has chosen to undertake this adaptation: they're calling the DS To-Love-Ru game a "2D digital comic with 3D touch action." Minigames on the DS are no big deal, but we like seeing more publishers getting the idea that the best way to adaptcomics to the DS is just to put them on there.
The DS Fist of the North Star game was already an interactive manga in which you tap spots on the screen to beat up on dudes. It was already pretty bizarre. But Spike has decided to pile bizarre upon bizarre with this bonus for early purchasers.
It's a keychain that plays a horse noise. Awesome, right? You could be out anywhere, and suddenly have the urge to listen to the sound of a horse, and just have a horse noise right there. In your pocket. To be fair, the horse immortalized by this keychain is not just some regular horse, but Kokuoh-Go, Raoh's giant horse who is also a king. Unfortunately, we don't know what Kokuoh-Go sounds like, but maybe his neigh is way tougher-sounding than a normal horse's.
GAME Watch has some new screens of the game, in case you're as interested in extremely violent screen-tapping as we are.
Famitsu has precious few (well, precious two) screens of DS de Yomu Tezuka Osamu Hi no Tori, the DS adaptation of Tezuka's Phoenix manga, but there's enough information there for us to get an idea of the presentation, at least. Basically, the full page appears on the bottom screen, and one panel at a time is zoomed in on the top screen. It's a very similar approach to Marvel Digital Comics' Smart Panels viewing style. We just hope that, unlike with Smart Panels, you are also able to move the panel view around manually in order to see more than just the focal point of each panel.
The 12 volumes of Phoenix are being divided into three DS cartridges, each retailing for 4,179 yen ($37). $37 isn't terrible for four books' worth of manga, but collecting whole series in DS format could still become painful quickly.
Spike has updated their Fist of the North Starwebsite with a couple of new screens showing the varied input methods in the game. The gameplay is not entirely limited to tapping things, but sometimes involves tapping and then dragging. We might not know too much about Fist of the North Star, but we know that any game involving using the stylus to cut a guy's face all criss-crossed is something we want to play.
Also revealed in the latest update: you'll be able to play as characters other than Kenshiro. Raoh is mentioned by name, but there will certainly be more.
You may expect some terrible DS platformer or something to be built from this comic license from legendary Astro Boy creator Osamu Tezuka, but that is not at all what developer Compile Heart is doing. Phoenix (also known as Hi no Tori/Fire Bird) is coming to the DS in its original form. As manga.
DS de Yomu Tezuka Osamu Hi no Tori is a collection of Phoenix comics to be read on the DS, featuring extra visual and sound effects (such as the screen shaking to emphasize a dramatic panel). Of course, other helpful features like bookmarking are also included. No word as to how much of the Phoenix backlog will be covered in this collection, though we doubt it's the whole thing. It'll be released in May for 4,179 yen ($37.50). If it works out, Compile Heart will expand the Read on DS series.
Capcom has created a site for a game based on the manga Rosario + Vampire. Like most manga, we didn't know what the hell this was. It turns out to be some high school romance thing, but it's at least got an unusual twist: the main character has been enrolled in a school for monsters by mistake! And then he falls in love with a vampire girl, so rather than going to the principal, he decides to pretend to be a monster. Oh, the comical misunderstandings that must ensue!
The game looks like a pretty standard dating sim/graphical text adventure thing. Travel to different locations around the school, talk to girls, that sort of thing. But ... monsters! Check out the "pre-opened" site for more screens.
Shion no Ou is a manga and anime series about a girl who sees her parents murdered, then watches as the murderer walks off with the "king" piece from the family's shogi board. She subsequently begins playing shogi in order to find the killer. Over time, the mute (from trauma) Shion begins enjoying the game, while continuing to search for clues about the shogi-playing killer's identity.
Further demonstrating the insane success of our favorite lawyer adventure game series, Del Rey Manga, publisher of Avril Lavigne's Make 5 Wishes, will be translating the official Gyakuten Saiban 
The DS's touchscreen technology has allowed us to indulge in some truly unique activities, from 
We thought this minigame in the Fist of the North Star DS game was awesome enough to warrant its own post. As the latest screenshot update on the official website illustrates, Raoh's storyline is playable in addition to Kenshiro's.
There's something about 
To-Love-Ru is a play on the Japanese pronunciation of the English words "trouble" (toraburu) and "love" (rabu). Unfortunately, the pun just doesn't fit native English phonology as well; to put a finer point on it, "tlovel" isn't all that funny or clever-sounding. Too bad. It's pretty neat that a pun on English words only works in another language's sound system, though, right?
Famitsu has precious few (well, precious two) screens of 
