Efun Games takes you back to Karakura Town and the Soul Society with the tactical RPG, BLEACH: Eternal Soul, to relive the adventures of Ichigo Kurosaki and his allies as well as revel in a variety of new challenges. BLEACH: Eternal Soul isn’t the first mobile game based on the popular manga and anime franchise, but it certainly has plenty of unique elements that set it apart from the other BLEACH titles in the mobile gaming market.
While BLEACH: Eternal Soul is an absolute treat for fans of the franchise, turn-based strategy RPG enthusiasts will certainly find a lot to enjoy as well. BLEACH: Eternal Soul holds more than 100 unique characters, which includes Ichigo’s friends, Shinigami, Arrancar, and even the Visored. With a 6-unit team roster, the possible combinations to make are almost boundless. Different game modes elicit different strategies as well, ensuring an immersive experience full of strategic planning and tactical execution of skills and abilities.
BLEACH: Eternal Soul certainly holds a lot to take in but the initial tutorial session guarantees to equip players with all the basics they need to know. Every first instance of a new feature or game mode also comes with its share of guidelines.
For complete beginners on the action part of the game, there is handy auto mode that does well enough on its own. If you have just jumped into the game and looking to jumpstart your action-packed adventure, you’ve come to the right place as our BLEACH: Eternal Soul beginner’s guide has everything you need to dominate your enemies!
1. Reroll For The Best Heroes
Strategy RPGs on mobile, more often than not, involve having a huge roster of characters that can be obtained through a gacha system. This method of drawing random units or shards of specific units are naturally based on luck, and entail a diminishing probability rate as the rarity of a unit or item goes higher. As such, long-time players of loosely similar strategy games are inclined to replay the initial minutes of a strategy RPG and go through their first set of pulls over and over until one of the units they want pops up.
For newbies to the concept of gacha and rerolling, the latter essentially a technique of sorts to ensure that you get a good jumpstart on your adventure with more powerful heroes in your team. It can take a long while to accomplish and may have to be gone through several times. On the other hand, it is not a necessity, and you can very much enjoy BLEACH: Eternal Soul with whichever starting heroes you receive.
One of the prerequisites of going for a reroll is to initially dive into the game with a guest account. This means you should skip the part where you link your game progress to an email or social media account and do so only when you are happy with your pulls. Although there are events and newbie gifts in BLEACH: Eternal Soul, you will still need to play a bit to amass 2,160 Soul Jades, which is the premium currency, to do a 10x summon.
This means that beyond the initial tutorial session and after claiming all the welcome and event gifts, you may still have to progress through the story quests a bit longer to have enough Soul Jades. Ultra rare characters cannot be obtained from the gacha as is and would have to be collected from shards. In this sense, what you would want to go for are SSR characters. Among the top picks for SSR characters are Soi Fon, Byakuya, Unohana, Yoruichi, Mayuri, and Toshiro.
If you do manage to get any of the SSR heroes you want on your first 10x pull, then you can move forward with your adventure and link your progress to your Gmail or Facebook account. If not, and you are ready to start over, then you can exit the game and clear the app data from your device. On an iOS device, however you will need to uninstall and reinstall the game.
Alternatively, you can tap on the gear icon at the upper right corner of the main screen, which leads to the system settings, tap on the server button, and choose to play again on a different server. This is a much faster way of going through the reroll process but if you have friends on a particular server, then the only option for you is the conventional approach, which is to clear everything from your device and start from total scratch.
2. Prioritize Story Quest Progression
One of BLEACH: Eternal Soul’s main treat to fans of the franchise is its take on the story. It is not an exact depiction of the manga and anime series but how it strays from the canon is justified to pump more action scenes and battles in the campaign. There are anime cut scenes included as well but you can skip all of them if you choose to. For players not familiar with BLEACH or any of its characters, the story campaign is a great way as well to be immersed in its lore and character backgrounds.
Beyond all that, taking on and accomplishing quests to progress through the story campaign serves as your key to unlocking other features and game modes in BLEACH: Eternal Soul. Naturally, as you would want to participate in each of the other game modes and take advantage of as many features sooner than later, it becomes a must to prioritize your progression through the story campaign as much as possible.
The story mode is divided into stages and each stage is divided further into sub-stages. Like most conventional strategy RPGs, the sub-stages have missions that you need to accomplish to earn stars. While it is possible to not secure a perfect 3-star victory on latter levels, you can always replay them to try and accomplish the missions you missed. Although only a 1-star rating is needed to claim the stage rewards, there are chest rewards that can be unlocked based on the number of stars you have collected.
The usual rewards you receive from completing a stage is important for your characters’ growth as these normally include resources you will constantly need for various upgrades. On top of the basic resources, milestones across the various stages will also earn you your starting team members and extra hero shards to strengthen some heroes further.
As you unlock additional game modes by progressing through the story mode, you will also unlock the elite mode within it. The elite mode is actually very different from the normal mode and has no story in it. Each stage is a battle against one of the characters and progressive in the sense that the characters you challenge are comparable to the conflicts in the series.
The elite mode, on a per stage basis, is not as difficult in comparison with the normal mode relative to how players might expect it to be. Elite stages come with their own set of rewards and missions that grant you star ratings, leading to opportunities of unlocking even more rewards.
3. Maintain A Balanced And Synergistic Team
With more than 40 characters currently available in BLEACH: Eternal Soul and more expected to join in future updates, the decision on how to build the ultimate team can be a huge and perplexing task, provided that you actually manage to obtain all characters. You will only start with a handful of characters, most of which are of the lower rarity grades. Continuous active engagement across all of the game’s content, however, will eventually net you more than enough characters to choose from.
The main and most popular basis of each character’s strength, utility, and potential across most gacha-based RPGs largely rest on that character’s rarity grade. In BLEACH: Eternal Soul, the rarity grades are R, SR, SSR, and UR, with R being the lowest grade. It is often a good idea to prioritize your highest grade characters in building a team and consider the rest in support of your top characters.
Each hero can be classified as well based on their class or role in the party. Characters are either attackers, defenders, or supporters. Attackers are generally in-charge of dealing damage to enemies and are typically at the spotlight when it comes tier lists and player favorites.
Defenders are often tanks and are the designated front row units to hold off most enemy attacks. Some defenders in BLEACH: Eternal Soul may not have as much defensive strength to be categorically considered a tanks but they offer skills that boost the defensive capabilities of their team and help in boosting survivability.
Supporters, as the name implies, provide various support for the team and while healing comes as the most sought after support ability, supporters actually provide a variety of helpful buffs for the party, and may also inflict negative status effects on the enemy team.
There are no strict recommendations as to how you choose to have your mix of the different classes or specializations in your main team. It is important, however, to have each of the classes represented as their exclusive roles and their skills’ performance, in conjunction with allies’ abilities, determine the team’s overall synergy and efficiency levels.
By accessing each character’s profile through the character icon on the main screen and the info button, you can check what each character specializes in beyond their main role. For the main character, Ichigo Kurosaki, for example, you will see that he is an attacker that specializes in dealing bleed damage and rage recovery. You can also check each character’s set of passive and active skills even if you have yet to unlock the characters or skills.
If you peek through your team’s formation, you will also notice 2 more elements to consider when choosing characters for the 6-unit party. One of them is the soul hall effect and the other is the counter system. Each character belongs to 1 of 4 different war souls: the Azure Dragon War Souls; the White Tiger War Souls; the Vermillion Bird War Souls, and the Black Tortoise War Souls.
Having 2 members of the same war soul in the team triggers a buff. 2 Azure Dragon Souls will unlock a 5% attack boost; 2 White Tiger Souls will trigger a 7% crit chance increase; 2 Vermillion Bird Souls will grant a 5% attack increase as well; and 2 Black Tortoise War Souls will trigger an extra 5% damage reduction. With these effects, having 6 members with 2 members each belonging to different War Souls is the optimum consideration to receive 3 of the 4 unlockable buffs.
The counter system in BLEACH: Eternal Soul works very much like the proverbial “rock-paper-scissors” that apply to different elemental affinities of units in conventional strategy RPGs. Attack types are strong against skill types but weak against defense types. Skill types have an advantage over defense types but are disadvantaged against attack types. Defense types excel against attack types but lag behind skill types. With advantageous unit types dealing more damage and receiving less damage against disadvantaged types, having a good mix of unit types are also recommended to have.
Another unique feature in BLEACH: Eternal Soul is the Bonds system that is unique to each one. At the character’s page, you can check this at the bottom part of the character’s profile. Clicking on it reveals how to activate each 1 of the 7 bonds and unlocking 5 of these will unlock the eighth bond. Once the requisites are complied with, you need to tap on the specific bond to activate it and receive the associated perks.
4. Be Prudent When Upgrading Your Heroes
BLEACH: Eternal Soul certainly does not fall behind other strategy RPGs when it comes to providing an array of upgrades and enhancements for heroes you have in your roster. There are plenty of ways to increase each character’s battle power or BP and you will initially receive ample resources to do so, perhaps even enough to properly upgrade a full team of 6 heroes to make them competitive enough to take on the current challenges.
Fully upgrading each one to the limit early on is already a huge feat, though, and despite the continuous flow of basic resources, it only grows tougher as upgrade costs go higher the farther you progress. What can further set you back is when you acquire a new character and decide to replace an existing member of your main team.
Given that there is a high chance of getting better characters as you move forward, you may experience this several times over. With this predicament in mind, it is best to be very selective when upgrading your characters right from the get-go.
The most basic way of boosting your character’s power is by levelling them up and despite earning bits of it through most battles, you can give each of your characters instant EXP by using EXP potions on them. This can be done on the upgrade tab of the character’s page. Note that there is a level cap for each character based on their enhancement level.
It may be difficult to notice at first but every character you unlock starts off with a white border around their portraits. You need endurance, agility, and strength soul stones as well as tenshintai to enhance each character to the next enhancement level. Like all other resources, you can tap on a resource you are lacking to see where you can acquire more of it. The quality of soul stones required increase as well as enhancement level progresses.
One of the more challenging, but absolutely necessary upgrade in BLEACH: Eternal Soul is promoting a character to the next star grade. Different rarities may start each character of with different star grades but each one can be promoted to 7 stars. In addition to gold coins, you need to amass additional hero shards specific to the hero you want to promote. Characters have unlocked skills based on their star grade from 2 to 6 stars so promoting a hero to the next grade will unlock a new skill for him or her.
Like the characters themselves, each of the hero’s skills can be upgraded as well. The maximum level you can upgrade each skill to is equal to that hero’s level. Skill upgrades only cost coins. The War Soul feature for each character unlocks extra passive abilities based on their enhancement level. Each color milestone reached beyond the green enhancement level unlocks a new war soul. Each war soul unlocked can also be promoted to boost its effects. Once a hero is promoted to 4-stars, new talents can also be unlocked based on the soul shards you have collected.
Each hero in your roster comes fully equipped with their personal Zanpakuto as well as 3 other gears. Each one can be upgraded as well using the same soul stones used to enhance characters. Progressing further through both normal and elite modes of the story gives you access to different grades of this soul stone, adding up yet another reason for you to prioritize accomplishing story quests.
Each gear’s star grade can also be promoted using awaken essences and can be awakened using extra copies of their gear, although awakening is not yet available at the time of this writing.
5. Join A Squad As Soon As You Can
The squad system in BLEACH: Eternal Soul is the equivalent of guilds, alliances, clans, and factions in other online games that promote camaraderie among players. Though BLEACH: Eternal Soul provides largely single player content, joining a squad provides additional benefits and grants you access to features unavailable for unallied players. Although there is always an option to create and lead your own squad, it is best for beginners to join existing ones first.
Donating to your squad helps make it grow faster so be sure to visit the squad’s camp daily and max out allowable gold donations. There is a boss dungeon as well as squad rewards to earn daily. Emblems from squad rewards can be exchanged for various resources and every bit of contribution you make as a member of a squad earns you prestige as well, which can be exchanged for items at the shop.
6. Engage In Arena And Challenge Game Modes
As expected from any strategy RPG, BLEACH: Eternal Soul comes with extra game modes that offer different kinds of challenges, each with its own set of unique rewards that can be difficult to obtain anywhere else. These additional game modes are divided across arena battles and challenges and unlocks based on your progression with your adventure.
One of the first challenges you will be able to unlock and partake in is the Seireitei Challenge. It resets once every 48 hours and you have to progress as far as you can across as many stages as possible. There are multiple paths on some stages giving you either more battles and Seireitei Coins, temporary recruits, or HP recovery. HP and rage levels do not reset every battle and while the initial levels are easy to beat, you need to be very strategic in your decisions later on.
Every set of enemies you defeat leaves you with 3 buffs to choose from. These buffs only apply to the current session of the challenge and will reset as well on its next instance. This is a game mode where having more upgraded characters matter but then again, you should stick to investing first in your main team, specifically the ones you feel will be useful for a long time.
The Battle Arena is is the most basic PvP mode in BLEACH: Eternal Soul and pits your team of heroes against other players’ teams. Battles are locked on auto mode and you can instantly skip to see the results. What is good about each challenge is that you can choose to challenge 1 of 3 players at a time and can even refresh up to 5 times to choose 1 from another set of players.
7. Accomplish Quests For More Rewards
Every bit of activity you engage in BLEACH: Eternal Soul practically earns you something but beyond the immediate rewards you receive after each battle or progression, more rewards are actually earned as activities form part of the numerous quests available. While you are most likely to accomplish a lot of quests early on without even knowing the specific objectives, it is best to check the requirements listed under each category within the quest page.
You can access quests via its icon at the bottom of your screen. The daily quests are typically the easiest ones to accomplish and should form part of your basic routine later on. Every daily target you meet earns you player EXP as well as activity points that unlock treasure chests above the page. You actually do not need to clear each daily quest to claim the top rewards from the chests at the top of the page. Points earned within the week, however, unlock additional rewards at the bottom of the page.
Both Milestones, Growth, and Story Mode Quests earn you rewards for milestones reached across basically every aspect of the game. It serves much like achievements, some of which will be accomplished easily while some require a lot of time and effort to accomplish. With Soul Jades being a common reward from the first 2 sets of quests and various valuable resources that can be earned from all 3, taking note of the tasks and striving to achieve them sooner will help propel your adventure’s progression at a much faster rate.
8. Take Advantage Of Special Events
The immediate rewards you earn from partaking in the story mode and other game modes as well as additional earnings from accomplishing quests should suffice to ensure to progression level that you can feel every step of the way. As much as the abundance of resources to earn from these activities and features are plenty by most standards, it can’t be helped that you will need more of these resources especially if you want each of your top units to be at their peak conditions.
Fortunately, BLEACH: Eternal Soul holds a wide array of special events that can definitely boost the manner by which you can make progress in your journey. Like quests that have objectives to accomplish, however, a lot of these rewards can be earned based on how active you are. The icons at the upper right side of the home screen exhibits available quests.
For the most part, each one will have a red dot indicator on its icon potentially signifying rewards awaiting for you to claim them. Be sure to peek into each one and while some may involve having to spend real money, there are plenty of events that very much only require you to reach certain milestones.
BLEACH: Eternal Soul certainly still holds plenty of upcoming characters and contents to add to its already massive world. For now, however, this is where we conclude our beginner’s guide. We certainly hope that you can readily apply the tips and strategies we shared to your continuing adventures in the game and if you encountered more tips we have not mentioned, we appreciate hearing from you about them down in the comment section!