Bleach

Ichigo Kurosaki is an ordinary high schooler—until his family is attacked by a Hollow, a corrupt spirit that seeks to devour human souls. It is then that he meets a Soul Reaper named Rukia Kuchiki, who gets injured while protecting Ichigo's family from the assailant. To save his family, Ichigo accepts Rukia's offer of taking her powers and becomes a Soul Reaper as a result.

However, as Rukia is unable to regain her powers, Ichigo is given the daunting task of hunting down the Hollows that plague their town. However, he is not alone in his fight, as he is later joined by his friends—classmates Orihime Inoue, Yasutora Sado, and Uryuu Ishida—who each have their own unique abilities. As Ichigo and his comrades get used to their new duties and support each other on and off the battlefield, the young Soul Reaper soon learns that the Hollows are not the only real threat to the human world.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Kurosaki, Ichigo Main

Morita, Masakazu Japanese

Kuchiki, Rukia Main

Orikasa, Fumiko Japanese

Inoue, Orihime Main

Matsuoka, Yuki Japanese

Abarai, Renji Main

Itou, Kentarou Japanese

Ishida, Uryuu Main

Sugiyama, Noriaki Japanese

Sado, Yasutora Main

Yasumoto, Hiroki Japanese

Zaraki, Kenpachi Supporting

Tachiki, Fumihiko Japanese

Urahara, Kisuke Supporting

Miki, Shinichiro Japanese

Aizen, Sousuke Supporting

Hayami, Show Japanese

Hitsugaya, Toushirou Supporting

Park, Romi Japanese

Simone, Jamie Producer

Hagino, Ken Producer

Aoki, Shunji Producer

Abe, Noriyuki Director, Episode Director, Storyboard

Reviews

Sep 18, 2024

kenconstantine

Recommended

Subjective in my opinion
- 8/10 The theme is good, about the god of death.
- 10/10 The organizational system is very clear, in my opinion this bleach has the clearest organizational structure of the anime I've ever watched.
- 8/10 The skill system is clear and explained in detail
- 7/10 The plot is ordinary, the pattern of fighting, defeat, victory, extra skills after the fight
- 8/10 The usual MC character (naive as usual)
- 9/10 The introduction of each character and skill is very clear.
- 9/10 The MC portion is good, the story runs parallel and is not too excessive in highlighting the MC.
- 9/10 Good visuals, considering ... the year it was published, in my opinion bleach is one of the anime with the best visuals.

Reviewer’s Rating: 9

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Apr 7, 2024

SuperEffectiveXP

Mixed Feelings

Well-written

Bleach is a story with a lot of potential. It falls short almost every time it has a chance to impress the viewer/reader. Almost every fight goes the same way, a new move/form is either discovered or they get reinforcements, the character depth doesn’t get explored very much throughout the series for well over half of the cast, everyone is often times fairly one dimensional as well, one can also argue the lore feels very strung together at times and serves the plot at complete randomness, arcs drag on a bit too long and overstay their welcome, arcs repeat similar patterns as previous ones, the ... power scaling is very linear and this leaves for not many surprises in battle, every interaction is plot armored heavily leaving it to feel like characters have minimal agency over their own story, while ichigo is cool, he as a character is ironically pretty….hollow ( lmao ), the art is good, but backgrounds are often neglected detail ( not necessarily a negative, maybe a stylistic choice ), too many filler if you’re anime only ( this problem was huge back when bleach was being made, not necessarily going to hold that against it, that was much more of an industry problem, however if you don’t skip them it still greatly hurts the experience besides a few arcs ), no character goal or motivation seems to have much nuance in this story ( with a few exceptions ), I listed most of what I think the negatives of bleach are. I could make the same list of things that I think are F***ING AWESOME, about bleach as well.

Bleach has a soundtrack and it’s absolutely amazing, they have a new style for almost every encounter and it’s beautiful. I find myself listening to this OST while playing video games, working out, or doing anything where I want to feel energy from music, it’s legitimately brilliant. Bleach also has a very cool character design. Most parts of this anime are simply and entirely infused with swagger. There’s no better way to put it, bleach in many aspects is just f***ing cool. Even if something doesn’t make sense, they make it seems like the coolest thing you might ever witness. It definitely helps bleach and its shortcomings to at the very least have it appear bad ass even when on its low points. The characters while fairly simple, are extremely charismatic. It’s easy to be charmed by the cast relatively quickly. Bleach can get very brutal and is themed in a really dark manner. There are many instances that bleach feels lifeless and hopeless and it does this theme well. It makes it all the more tense and much more gut wrenching when seeing the afterlife’s only protectors in a crisis. All the more triumphant when they win as well. The bleakness of bleach can be its strength, but also a weakness. It plays back into everyone feeling relatively one dimensional along with there seemingly being no goals or purpose beyond the threats that arise ( which you know, fair enough that’s their purpose in a sense ).

All in all, I like bleach. It’s a time investment so that’s something to consider, but I personally enjoyed this anime enough for what it is. By no means is it perfect or even near my favorites, but I will always remember it. Many things that commence in this show are absolutely iconic. It will have its ups and downs if you do choose to watch it, that’s something to be fully prepared for. I would say that there are better shonen out there, however bleach has a specific flavor that I’ve never seen replicated. For that and that alone, I appreciate it as an anime very much.


I think how you feel about this series solely depends on a few things. 1. How much or how important are the things I just mentioned to you? 2. What do you value out of bleach or in other words, what did you come in expecting to get out of the series. 3. Were the spectacular parts of bleach enough to have you thoroughly enjoying the manga/anime through to the end? 4. ( this is an important one ) How much do you like shonen as a genre to begin with? I can tell you right now, someone who hates shonen will hate this show. While watching and reading, it began to feel like to me, many shonen traits and popular tropes I’ve seen mimicked throughout the years must’ve came partially from bleach. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it was kind of funny to realize during my time consuming it. Either way, love or hate the series, bleach seems to be a show and manga that is polarizing to an extent. Some people may love it, some may hate it, some may think it’s meh. All have perfectly valid reasons for feeling each way, I truly believe it all depends on your own personal value system with this anime.

Thank you for reading. I tried to be fair, concise and straightforward, nothing too complex to write about. Hopefully I accomplished that and also gave new and old viewers alike a broader perspective of bleach as a whole. I would encourage new readers/viewers to take what I said to heart and really consider if they want to continue with watching it. At least for me, when I have a large time investment in an anime or really anything, I want to feel like it’ll be worth it as I’m sure most others do as well. The “ worth it “ aspect of bleach will spend on how you feel about everything I mentioned. BUT hey…at least if you watch it you can say you’ve seen one of the big three :) . It’s a huge foundation of the industry, so it’s cool to at least try out. Maybe give it a chance and see if it’s for you.

Reviewer’s Rating: 7

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Mar 26, 2024

Eironn

Not Recommended

Well-written

Spanning 366 episodes, Bleach is regarded as one of the big shonen shows out there, sitting at the same table as One Piece, Naruto and Dragonball. Watching it in 2024, however, I can tell you that Bleach aged like milk.

First of all, I could sit here and talk about fillers all day, but we've all seen the memes. Bleach is *at least* 45% filler, but even that is a generous number. If you remove all the useless shonen tropes like pointless flashbacks, repetitive shouts, long running scenes, still shots, slow camera panning and reused frames, you'll soon realize that Bleach is more like 70% filler.

Bleach ... also has a serious issue with bystanders that *constantly* interrupt fights and serious moments so they can do their comedy routine. And it's not even good comedy. It's children's comedy. Manzai is a very popular (and exhausting) type of comedy where the "funny man" does goofy things while the "straight man" gets angry and reprimands them. Alright, now crank that up to the maximum, shove it in the middle of life-or-death situations, and make it as long and obnoxious as possible. That's Bleach's comedy. The thing is, Bleach knows how to create funny moments, but it does so at the worst possible times as the story progresses.

Speaking of progress, that's one of the weird things about Bleach. Instead of getting better as the series goes on (like the other three big shonen series), Bleach does the opposite. One quick search and you'll see that the community generally agrees that Bleach was awesome in the first few arcs but had a drastic decline in quality and pacing as the story progressed. Even my friend who recommended it to me said that he skipped almost all of it. Putting Bleach on the same category as Dragonball, One Piece and Naruto is almost disrespectful. How can I recommend a series that only has one or two good arcs and then say: "By the way, it gets really bad towards the end."

-- Minor Spoilers Ahead --

Another big issue that Bleach has are the power levels. The power levels are all over the place and it's not even funny. Ichigo always gets his ass kicked by every new enemy, only to be saved by someone he defeated previously. Now the person who is supposedly weaker than Ichigo proceeds to defeat the villain who is supposedly stronger than Ichigo. This happens because Bleach is a kid's show where the protagonist befriends all of his enemies, even the ones that do unspeakably evil things. No matter how edgy Bleach tries to be with its dark imagery, at the end of the day it's just a kid's show. The constant bickering in the middle of fights is no different than children fighting in the playground to decide who gets to be the Red Power Ranger, and in the end we see everyone holding hands and singing a song together.

Bleach looks particularly ugly when you compare it to the flashy and action-packed modern shonen shows we've been getting recently, but it also looks ugly when you compare it to the other big shonen shows of the 2000s. The action, pacing, story and even the training arcs are completely messed up. Honestly, I basically just watched 366 episodes of a show I detest for the sole purpose of watching the sequel, which people say is really good.

The sad thing about Bleach is that it had such a strong identity. The captains are cool as hell, the overall theme is unique, the setting had a lot of potential, and the Soul Society arc was amazingly good. I loved everything about Bleach at first. Hell, even the way the characters hold their swords when they're not fighting tells you something about their character. Even some of the lines that characters say are so powerful that they'll stick with you for a while. The creativity and attention to detail here was great, and I hate using the past tense here.

Honestly, I don't even think that this is the case of a bad anime adaptation. For example, you've probably heard someone somewhere say: "Bleach is good but the ending was kinda scuffed." And no, it's not like a beloved character dies or anything. The "ending" is bad because the author decided to introduce the weirdest and most nonsensical magic system ever created. Everything that made Bleach great is suddenly replaced by elements that genuinely make you forget that you're watching Bleach. Hueco Mundo's arc was bad in terms of pacing and power levels, but the last arc is especially insulting. Bleach's antagonists stopped being cool and memorable after the Soul Society arc (save for a few exceptions), but the last arc manages to be even worse in that regard. We even get a discount Aizen that fails to capture even 1% of what made the original a good villain.

In conclusion, I unfortunately can't recommend Bleach. It's simply not worth it. It doesn't hold up well today and only serves as an example of how to ruin something that had everything to be great. This review may sound overly negative, but it's just an honest warning.

Reviewer’s Rating: 3

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