So I used to really enjoy watching Bleach when it was new and just starting to air on Adult Swim late Saturday night years ago. I saw the first episode and found myself hooked, and as each week passed, I would watch an episode. I really liked how the series was pacing along with its initial episodes.
Eventually I started to watch the subbed episodes online and still enjoyed it, but then I realized I hit the first episode of the Soul Society Arc. That's when everything started to get bumpy for me.
After that arc began, I immediately found myself dreading the storyline instead of enjoying it. The filler episodes before it started off so well, too. With the initial filler episodes, the series showed a whole lot of potential and promise in the future. I was excited for the moment that everything would really start. I was so wrong. If you must know, the Soul Society Arc starts at about episode 20, and it involves a key character being abducted and needing to be rescued from another world, the Soul Society. So I started to watch the episodes here and found myself realizing the show seemed significantly less exciting at this point. But I figured after maybe five or ten episodes, they'd wrap everything up and move onto the next big thing. After all, it was only episode 20. They'd be done soon, right?
Later on to around episode 40, THE ENTIRE ARC IS STILL GOING AND STILL ISN'T FINISHED. If you think about it, most anime shows last 50 episodes before they wrap everything up, but this arc wasn't even finished. The writing gave me the impression that the author was dragging his feet and improvising the entire thing as he went along. But hey, some shows last more than 50 episodes and are still doing great, right? So I continued to watch.
I end up around episode 60 and I'm just dreading how long this arc managed to be stretched out. Especially after a particularly pointless and painful filler episode (I think it was episode 50) that seemed so out of place and out of nowhere just earlier. And finally, a few episodes after 60, the arc finally comes to an unsatisfying end.
That's when I realized this show had another fatal flaw that the first arc made it develop: WAY too many characters. If any of you guys are familiar with Sonic the Hedgehog, the series became a sort of mish mash of annoying secondary characters taking up space. Bleach has a similar problem, but instead of letting them all take up space, the author feels the need to develop each and every single one of them as he goes along, and at times it just feels incredibly forced. It felt like the development of all these characters was holding up the progression of the entire arc and delaying it further, when it could have ended a lot sooner otherwise. Some of them he does an okay job on developing, but other ones just seem annoying and make me wonder why they need to continue existing.
But we'll touch up on that a bit more in a moment. Anyway, after the Soul Society Arc ended, it looked like a new arc was going to start, and this one looked a whole lot more promising. The first few episodes of it had me really interested, like this was going to be some kind of psychological and really clever part of the series. However, instead of being an actual arc, it ends prematurely on a very disappointing cop out, where we have several more useless characters introduced as a result. Somebody never told the creator of the series that too many cooks can spoil the broth.
So anyway, there's another arc starting, the Bount Arc, and then I find the series going straight back to the feet-dragging, pointless writing of the Soul Society Arc. The arc is so boring and was absolutely painful for me to watch. So much so that most fans have told me that I should have just skipped it. But really, if I have to skip any parts of a series, that's a good indicator that it's probably not worth watching. That also raises a red flag in terms of how ineffective somebody can be at storytelling. Anyway, this arc also attempts some character development with a staple character, but I really felt like it was forced or shoehorned in.
At this point in the series, I had been on and off trying to continue the series, but I slowly began to dislike it the further I went along. Eventually, I got to episode 94 and after realizing a lot of the background characters were jumping in out of nowhere to remind us they exist and act as deus ex machinas, I decided that was the last straw and dropped the series for good.
I really wanted to like this series. I truly did. I enjoyed it from the beginning, and the first series intro still gives me nostalgia whenever I see it (I would go as far as saying the first intro is one of my favorite anime intros ever; I still love it to this day). But after being really promising at the beginning, the series really drops the ball when the actual story begins, and everything goes from being carefully planned out to being improvised rather poorly as time passes.
Something else that always bothered me a bit about the series is the ending themes. The filler episodes at the beginning usually end on a cheery or satisfactory note, and then the ending theme is a rather sad song "Life Is Like A Boat". Nothing wrong with the song since I liked it, but then later during the Soul Society Arc, the juxtaposition becomes much worse and less appropriate. Several episodes during the Soul Society Arc end on dreadful cliffhangers, and the ending theme is "HAPPY PEOPLE", an upbeat and lively pop-ish song about being happy. Doesn't really do a good job adding to the atmosphere.
Characterization is flawed as I mentioned above for having too many characters to focus on. As a result, Ichigo, the protagonist, shows little to no development, or he develops it so slowly that it doesn't matter. He develops adequately enough during the initial filler episodes as far as anime standards go, but once the Soul Society Arc begins, he becomes the walking embodiment of the generic "get more powerful and beat them" cliche. Any character development during the story arcs I've seen is often minimalized to give more time to lesser characters. In other words, the characterization isn't so bad, but it's just spread far too thin.
So closing thoughts, the music and sound were okay in the series, but I found a lot of it forgettable or just good enough. The art is adequate, but nothing to really make your jaw drop in awe.
