Reviews

I have a serious love/hate relationship with Bleach. While the overall story and battle scenes are usually pretty intense and rewarding, they are too few and far between. In order to get to the meat of the anime, you are forced to wade through hours of boring dialogue and lame slice-of-life episodes that seem way out of place. While I (somewhat) appreciate Bleach's attention to explaining how the characters' powers work, it is overdone to the point where battles lose all significance and weight due to the bland and lengthy explanations.

Bleach's biggest problem is the fact that it tries to take 10 episodes worth of a story arc and draw it out until it's around 30-40 episodes, which makes the story for each arc seem slow and repetitive. I think you would be surprised by how much of this show is just filler. For a 25 minute show, approximately 8 minutes of it is spent with the opening, recap and ending (Thats almost a THIRD of each episode). Then once you get to the actual show, you get to see one or two cool attacks before the characters go into lengthy dialogue describing their special abilities, their reasons for fighting, etc., etc.

All in all, I can't say I would recommend this anime. While the fights are sometimes pretty cool and the story has a few redeeming qualities, the show is far too slow and repetitive to be worth watching all the way through.