Gintama follows Gintoki and his crew of outcasts in their daily routine of trying to make ends meet with a main overarching story in the background, all of it presented in episodic structure with longer arcs from time to time. This is why while being a Shounen Gintama often feels like a slice of life kind of series with slow development of the overall story and while it may sound like something you wouldn't want to watch it works perfectly for this series.
Other main feature of Gintama is of course its comedy which as a person who doesn't enjoys anime comedy while having trouble understanding many of the references show throws around I still enjoyed with about 70% of the jokes making me laugh, even tho this may seem like a low percentage, jokes that didn't make me laugh never were cringe worthy enough to make me regret watching this anime.
In contradiction to the jokes of which enjoyment depends on your taste i can assure you that Gintama masterfully incorporates them into the story and in even more impressive manner author can change atmosphere into something completely different.
While humor is good Gintama is first and foremost about characters for me. An episodic character making an appearance for only one arc can have more depth or impact than protagonists of other not so bad animes. Gintoki being one of the best protagonists ever written is a perfect example of effort and planning author put into Gintama. Despite being a protagonist we see Gintoki's character not from his perspective but mainly from the eyes of other people which works perfectly with his mysterious background that is being slowly revealed to us. While Gintama is great at characters with enormous variety of different personalities it has some problems with its villains that I will mention later.
Gintama of course being an 2006 anime is not on the pinnacle of animation or technical innovation which isn't too disturbing except in some instances when they use cgi. In the music department it also isn't anything too special. Tracks are good and they fit with what is presented but after a hundred episodes realisation of how few tracks they really have is starting to kick in.
The biggest problem of Gintama is with redemption. Every big villain if not redeemed at the last second at least needs to tell you his side of the story. Shinsengumi Crisis, aging cubes, blacksmiths, spider... Everytime it goes the same way: bad guy does something horrific like murder or creating a weapon of mass destruction for stupid reason, we have a showdown, after a tough fight antagonist is beaten and then... pause! Show stops and villain goes into 'let me tell you my story' mode or someone does it for him, after that we get a redemption and the cycle repeats. I really hate it and started to get tired by it.
To conclude Gintama is a great show and you should give it a try but don't go in expecting flawless masterpiece.
