Happy New Year!

Thank you for playing Bleach: Brave Souls!

This is the first of what we plan to be a regular series of dev diaries where we can share information regarding forthcoming updates and content, respond to comments and questions we receive from players, and share thoughts from the dev team. To start things off, we will be taking a quick look back over the previous year and also looking forward to some of what is to come in 2022.

2021

This year we saw the first release of characters from the “Spirits Are Forever With You” novel. We hope you enjoyed the illustrations and designs of these unique tie-in characters and had fun playing with them. For our part, we were very pleased to see the positive response to these Brave Souls original versions we received from many players. In July, we also released the special Artworks version of Ichigo and the 6th Anniversary version of Aizen. Both characters are still seeing regular use by many players. Finally, we released the new Arena game mode, which made it possible for players from all over the world to play together in real time.

Outside the game, we were proud to release the Bleach: Brave Souls Official Artworks book, which celebrates the fantastic work put in by our character artists over the many years since Brave Souls was first released.

August marked the 20th anniversary of the start of the Bleach manga. This was celebrated in a number of ways in Japan, including a special two-part story in Shonen Jump and the opening of the Bleach Ex. exhibition in Tokyo. Then, of course, there was the long-awaited announcement of the anime adaptation of the Thousand Year Blood Way story arc, scheduled to begin airing in October 2022.

We are sure you are just as excited about these developments as we are. Everyone here on the Brave Souls team will continue to do our best to keep the Bleach flame burning.

2022

We will be starting 2022 with a bang with the release of the Spirits Are Forever With You original versions of Kenpachi Zaraki and Retsu Unohana, developed under close supervision from Tite Kubo. A lot of effort has gone into the design of these characters, so we hope you enjoy them. We plan to deliver great new characters for you every month over the coming year.

The dev team is constantly monitoring feedback from players, and going forward we plan to continue implementing any changes that are needed to make the game as fun as possible. One of our top priorities at the moment is to streamline the Accessory second effect rolling process, something players have been requesting for quite some time. We will also continue to update the game by improving any functions that are needlessly tedious, difficult to use, or hard to understand.

However, we are fully aware that things have not all been plain sailing this past year. We have had a large number of bugs and other issues with the game over the last twelve months that prevented many players from playing the game properly, and we would like to take this opportunity to apologize once again for the delays in responding to these issues. We also know that there have been times when updates and other content did not meet player expectations due to insufficient consideration on our part, so we would also like to apologize again for falling short in this regard.

Going forward, as well as these dev diaries, we will also be periodically posting notices via our various social network accounts about any future updates.

2022 looks like it should be a great year for Bleach. All of us here on the Brave Souls team will do our best to add to that excitement, and we hope you stick with us for it. There may be some things we have yet to achieve, but we will continue to strive to make Brave Souls the best it can be.

We hope you continue to enjoy the game.