Summary: >

Ichigo was a high school student with the unusual ability to see spirits who haven't yet passed on. One day he encounters a girl named Rukia fighting some sort of monster. As she lay injured, she transfers her power to him so that he can fight off the monster instead. Rukia is what is known as a Soul Reaper, and her job is to send these monsters (lost souls known as hollows) to the after life. The problem is that she transferred her powers to Ichigo and can't just take them back. Now he will have to act as a soul reaper in her place.

As things turn out, Ichigo happens to have power as a soul reaper on the level no one has ever seen before. He's going to need it too. Each of the trials he faces is far more of a challenge than the last.

Thoughts: >

Bleach is yet another shounen fighting "power up" series which fails to differentiate itself much, but is still pretty enjoyable for what it is. Well kinda. While I prefer to review individual seasons, Bleach is a series which stretches to the point where I'm not sure it ever will actually end, or it's quite possible I will have died of old age and never get to review the whole thing anyway. So keep in mind that this will be a very long review because there's a lot of ground to be covered. Having seen over 100 episodes (with a lot of fast forwarding through filler garbage), it's hard to say where all of this will go. I have this foreboding feeling that Bleach is going to stretch itself too far and wear out its welcome.

If I were to name the stand out feature of Bleach, it would most certainly be the crazy large cast. I read somewhere that creator Noriaki Kubo likes to create characters and it shows in this title. There are so many, and they vary widely but in particular they all have such different designs. As things progressed I found this to also be a big weakness of Bleach (more on that later). Ichigo is a typical spiky haired shounen protagonist that is a surprisingly weak character due to being presented in a way which is one dimensional. Having watched so many episodes I couldn't tell you even the simplest details about him. What his favorite food is, what he likes to do in his spare time, etc. Throughout the series he wants to protect the people he cares about, and struggles to gain strength, but he never really does anything else. He's always got this badass air about him, and talks tough with little deviation. As a (strait) male who went through teenage years I find it hard to believe that Ichigo could be indifferent about a girl who's bust is so big it spans multiple zip codes - especially when she has an interest in him. And no 15 year old has boobs as big as Orihime. Hell, most 15 year olds aren't as big as her boobs.

Bleach makes some mistakes, but what is annoying is how it repeats them over and over. It introduces interesting characters (a LOT of characters) but doesn't develop them past telling their back story. That's too bad because a lot of them have really good stories to back them up. Time after time I expected something more, but then even worse than not developing them, Bleach regurgitates the same stuff we've already seen as if THAT were development. Ugh!

As Bleach starts, the core cast is introduced and Ichigo starts down the path of being a Soul Reaper. For the most part this is a formula monster of the week fare, but has some interesting ideas and a good enough setup. At the conclusion of the first series, Rukia is taken back to the Soul Society and slated for execution. Ichigo and his crew then decided to break into Soul Society and break her out of jail. I would have expected this to take about 2-3 episodes but they literally just run around lost for about 20, then spend another 20 trying to break her out. The break-in to Soul Society got rather tiresome with its terribly slow pacing, but at some point Bleach figured out that instead of concentrating on one battle with tons of filler, they'd have multiple battles at the same time and switch between them - somehow that actually worked. This chapter of Bleach ends after episode 63 and I thought it had done a decent job. That's when the filler seasons kicked up. Yeah, that's right - entire seasons of filler.

At this point the anime had caught up with the Bleach manga. So instead of taking a break they decided to invent its own story arc. It sounds like a potential disaster, but I thought of it as an opportunity to pick up the pace and fill in lots of back story we hadn't gotten. The Bount series unfortunately didn't do that and pretty much botched everything. Bleach had introduced interesting characters that were very different from one another, but the new characters in the Bount series are generic and totally forgettable. Existing characters aren't developed any father either, and in fact act are so rigidly cast in their framework that they become caricatures of themselves. As if this anime was afraid of not being a perfect copy of the manga. There is no tension in any of the battles, and it features an uninspired plot with vampires; this story was a lost cause. This is what takes you through the 100 episode mark. Aside from a slightly interesting development happening every 10 episodes or so, the only other redeeming value in this part was the ending sequence with stuffed animals which was so cute that it entered the domain of being hypnotic.

[+] Other Complaints

Ok, so this seems like as good of a point as any to give my judgment on the state of the series. Bleach involves a decent setup, and a decent story but the plot never goes very deep. My biggest gripe with Bleach is that it's slow paced, and has a level of ass dragging I've not seen since Dragonball Z (king of ass dragging titles). It took me 12 episodes in to even warm up to this series, and even then it felt like I had to slog through most of it. Seriously, Bleach could easily be condensed to 1/3 the length with NO LOSS to the story.

The designs are pretty decent throughout, and characters have a wide variety. The animation is fair, but action sequences are downright disappointing. If it even manages to have a glimmer of high movement action it's unusual for Bleach. Most of it is just big flashes of light, explosions, and edited to imply fast movement. The music is pretty much recycled through the entire thing but works pretty well.

My end verdict is that Bleach is OK. There is just too much filler for me to get into it as much as I would have liked, and eventually my interest waned. I welcomed the large cast of characters, but became disenchanted with them as they were never developed very far. If I had stopped at episode 63 I would have been alright with Bleach, but the whole Bount thing was just a total waste of time. Some will recommend you don't even bother watching this story arc but seriously you're not watching 40+ episodes of a series. That's where I stand too, and would recommend you only watch to episode 63 and call it quits. Maybe more happens, I don't care. If they come out with this wonderfully developed elaborate story and great character depth I don't care either. That won't happen though, because I can say that they had 100 episodes to do all this stuff and they still didn't.

It sounds like I'm really down on Bleach, but I do think it was a decent shounen title. With the amount of free you need to invest, I would have preferred it accomplished far more than it did.