Bleach review

_thunder13
Apr 04, 2021
I'm well aware that I'm not saying anything groundbreaking here, but I felt like writing down my thoughts anyway. Finally reading this after being so engrossed with the DS game as a kid some 12-13 years ago was quite the trip. While it does contain several shounen tropes that hold it back, the Soul Society arc is genuinely engrossing and well done. It's an intricate but simple story with effective characterization that makes every fight feel important. The series is essentially diet Yu Yu Hakusho at the beginning, but during the SS arc it really comes in to its own and displays signs of the stellar ensemble storytelling that you'd see in something like FMA. As someone who dislikes the other two big 3 series (at least as of this writing; One Piece is so acclaimed that I'll have to go back and give it another try at some point), I have to say that this arc alone is enough to make Bleach my favourite of the 3.

Which is why it was genuinely shocking to me how quickly and dramatically it falls off the rails immediately afterwards. It basically switches up from the character based storytelling I mentioned before to an endless wave of incomprehensible and over indulgent battle scenes that pit the good guys against interchangeable jobbers who basically get introduced just to be defeated in quick fashion. I found it extremely difficult to care, or care to follow, anything that was going on from, like, volumes 23-45. The chaotic and messy fights, the excess of characters I had no reason to care about, the incredibly convoluted abilities, the pseudointellectual dialogue and the wonky power scaling just became to much for me to handle. And how the author thought it was a good idea to do ANOTHER massive rescue arc so soon after the Soul Society eludes me. Things pick up ever so slightly towards the end of the Arrancar Arc, but this is still mostly based on it being a direct continuation of the Soul Society stuff that I was invested in.

So yeah. Generous 5/10 all in all, and it seems that the consensus is things more or less stay the same or get even worse after this, so I so no reason to continue. It's a shame, I really think this could have been one of my favourite shounens if it maintained the same energy of the second arc throughout.
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Bleach
Bleach
Autore Kubo, Tite
Artista