Jump Force Confirms More Playable Bleach Characters

Jump Force welcomed three new Bleach characters to the fighting game just days ago with the [...]

Jump Force welcomed three new Bleach characters to the fighting game just days ago with the remaining two of those now confirmed to be playable fighters.

Making good on Bandai Namco's promise that more news would be shared throughout the summer, the first post-announcement reveal came last week when it was confirmed that Ichigo from Bleach would be a playable character. It wasn't much of a stretch to imagine that the anime and manga protagonist would be in Jump Force, but it was unclear at the time if Rukia Kuchiki and Sosuke Aizen, two more Bleach characters confirmed for the game, would also be playable.

That's now changed with the most recent issue of Weekly Shonen Jump. Anime News Network reported that the latest issue of the weekly magazine revealed on Monday that both Rukia and Aizen would be playable in Jump Force alongside Ichigo. It's unclear how they'll tie into the game's story mode, but they'll all three find themselves playable alongside characters from other brands like Dragon Ball and One Piece.

This brings the list of confirmed playable characters in Jump Force to a total of nine characters, the others being Frieza and Goku from Dragon Ball Z, Luffy and Zoro from One Piece, Naruto and Sasuke from Naruto, and Ichigo as mentioned previously. Bandai Namco's got many more characters to reveal though, so we can expect this list to grow tremendously since the roster has just barely scratched the surface of what Shonen Jump has to offer with only four brands sporting playable characters.

Two who aren't part of that list are Light Yagami and Ryuk, characters that were teased for Jump Force but won't be playable. Despite their dramatic appearance at the end of the E3 trailer above, players won't be able to control the two Death Note characters. We spoke to Bandai Namco at E3 to learn more about the game and were told that the pair wouldn't be playable in Jump Force and would rather be seen as story characters, though their roles in the narrative are unknown.

There's still at least one character that should likely come as a surprise to anime and manga fans as well, at least according to the game's producer Koji Nakajima. He wouldn't show favoritism by saying which Jump Force character he likes best, but he did tease that there's one who he feels strongly about, a character that's both "unusual" and "unexpected."

Jump Force is scheduled to be released sometime in 2019.

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