YMMV / Bleach: The 3rd Phantom

• Game-Breaker:
  • While all Bankai can be abused this way, special mention must go to Byakuya's Bankai S. Kageyoshi combo when leveled up correctly, it is a skill automatically given to Byakuya, so all you need to do is level his bankai and second skill routes, and you suddenly have a hollow-killing machine.
  • Area of effect healing spells can break the main story in half, as they allow absurdly rapid Level Grinding, thanks to giving a flat 30 exp per unit healed, regardless of if they actually need healing. Since a level is always 100 exp, this means that a healer with Meiyu (such as Rukia, Momo, or Nemu) can gain a level and a half every turn as long as their SP holds out, and at some point, they're SP regeneration will be high enough to continuously cast it. This allows even characters who are normally ill-suited to direct combat, like Orihime or Rukia, to, depending on how you distribute their stat points, either be even more ridiculously powerful casters, or hit like Kenpachi.
  • Area of effect Kido spells like Sokatsui utterly trivialize multiple-tile enemies, as they hit the enemy once for each tile of of overlap between the enemy and the area of effect.
  • Status Effects spells, should they actually take effect, can absolutely cripplingly debuff a target. In particular, Burn and Freeze stand out for their game breaking potential.
    • Burn, in addition to doing Damage Over Time, halves attack and defense, which can make fights that are supposed to be nearly unwinnable (eg. in Chapter 15, Arturo is supposed to be noticeably more powerful than you, but not enough so to completely wipe the floor with you in a sort of Downplayed version of a Hopeless Boss Fight, but if you burn him with Haien or Matsuri's passive burn ability, defeating him is pretty much trivial).
    • Freeze halves the other two stats, accuracy and evasion, meaning that someone inflicted with freeze is going to miss almost every attack and be hit with almost every attack. What's more, Toshiro Hitsugaya can inflict an enhanced version called Ice Cage that acts as freeze and hold at the same time, meaning it also prevents movement and standard attacks.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: During the Fake Captain Arc, fake Unohana is a vicious sadist who delights in the suffering of others. While she is observed as being pretty much the opposite of the real Retsu Unohana, she's very much like Yachiru Unohana, a bit of Captain Unohana's past that wouldn't be revealed until several years after the game came out.
• Scrappy Mechanic: A repeated complaint of the game in reviews is its unskippable, always-on combat animations and turn transitions, which have the effect of greatly slowing down gameplay.
• That One Level:
  • Chapter nine subjects you to a Wake-Up Call Boss in the form of the Arrancars Yammy and Ulquiorra, the latter of whom diverges from the source material by joining the fight alongside Yammy. Both of the Arrancar are several levels above the playable characters for the chapter, who start out as just Uryu, Chad, and Orihime. The goal is basically to hold out and protect Tatsuki and to a lesser extent, Orihime and Uryu, until Ichigo and, later, Urahara and Yoruichi join as badly-needed reinforcements and Ichigo can build up for his Bankai.
  • The 30th Floor of Bleach Tower. There are extremely powerful versions of Arturo, Seigen, Kenpachi, Soi Fon, Ichigo, Yoruichi, D-Roy, Ulquiorra, Yamamoto, Gin, and Grimmjow, and toward where your characters start, there's a Sky Rift that spews Hollows! Thankfully, to win, you only have to defeat Grimmjow, but he's level 90, has insane stats, and can Release. Expect most of your characters to die.
  • The Final Boss deserves mention as well. The boss has numerous tentacles which each have 2000+ HP and are All-element. On top of that, the boss has a Wave-Motion Gun that goes across the entire map and can Shock, and just being in the boss's vicinity also causes Shock. Which is highly annoying because being able to use Skills makes the fight go much quicker, and also makes healing harder due to the arbitrary 10-item limit on inventory. And once you actually get to fighting the boss? He hits like a truck and has massive HP. If you have Co-op attacks, it makes things slightly easier, but it still takes a long time to whittle him down.
  • Several of the Bankai training bonus missions are exceptionally difficult, as well. While these are all optional, failure or other noncompletion of any of the trainings will result in a lesser reward than Bankai.
    • Zanjutsu Training I: Single Blow has several things that make it one of the hardest maps in the game. First, there is a rather harsh turn limit. Second, you are locked into using your player character, Ichigo, Renji, and Komamura, leaving you in a rough place if you haven't been training them. Third, one of the enemies can lock units in place, which is almost an instant failure of the map, as every move counts. Fourth, all of the enemies on the map are quite durable. Fifth, and greatly aggravating the previous point, every enemy fully heals at the beginning of your turn. Completing the stage with a character optimized for it is tough, and with an unoptimized character, nearly impossible.
    • Female Soul Reaper Society Training takes your player character and all the playable female Soul Reapers except Captain Unohana (Yachiru, Nemu, Rukia, Momo, Soi Fon, Yoruichi, and Rangiku) and makes randomized teams, which can be either even or three against five, which can make it either trivial or extremely difficult depending on who you get and who you've been using, and if Yoruichi has learned the Hit and Run skill, there's a Game-Breaking Bug where the AI won't end her action after she attacks, so if she knows Hit and Run, you had better either get her on your team or be able to finish her in no more than two rounds of combat (provided that you attack her first).
    • Team Karakura Training requires you to Konso three distant Wholes with Ichigo or your player character before they turn into Hollows, which results in instant failure of the stage, and keep Ichigo's friends, none of whom are particularly great units unless you've been level grinding them, alive while you do so. Furthermore, the existing Hollows are in an excellent position to both block your access to the Wholes and accelerate their Hollowfication and Ichigo has low movement unless in Bankai and cannot perform Konso in Bankai, which also turns the long duration of Ichigo's Bankai against you.
    • To the Human World Training has you face a massively buffed Don Kan'onji and Kon and you have to survive long enough for their stats to decay back to their easily beatable normal levels. Again like Team Karakura Training, unless you picked up an extra movement point, which you may well not have if you were preparing for Zanjutsu Training I, Kon and Don Kan'onji will catch up to you before their stats fully return to normal, and will likely still be high enough to cause serious damage for a turn or two.
    • Compounding the difficulty of two of the prior "one levels", optimizing your main character to beat Team Karakura Training and Zanjutsu Training I: Single Blow is mutually exclusive, as you aren't allowed to spend enough points on skills to both boost movement for Team Karakura Training and get Sokatsui + Eishohaki (cast on the same turn as movement) to take out the large enemies in Zanjutsu Training I in a timely manner.
• Unexpected Character:
  • Sojiro Kusaka from Diamond Dust Rebellion is a Secret Character that can be found in the Bleach Tower, despite neither him nor other characters or plot points from the film showing up in the story.
  • There is absolutely no in-game reason to assume that Shinji and Hiyori would be available characters, as they only show up as cutscene units beforehand and neither you nor Ichigo have interacted with them for about 20 chapters, but you can recruit them for the assault on Hueco Mundo or later in the Bleach Tower.