Sadly the anime does not seem to stay as true to the manga as it once did, from 200 and forward the quality of the anime starts to drop. In a sad way to keep the anime at the right pace, the animators start to alter the parts of the "journey" to draw out the episodes and sadly most of the time they make the characters act like idiots, doing things that their manga counterparts realized was stupid or just never did. Like doing the same thing to an enemy multiple times without effect, or fighting an incredibly much weaker character and still having a hard time, even though it usually ended in an instant in the original work. The fillers are usually boring with mediocre characters being introduced constantly to never be heard of again and weirdly tied into an altered story to fit. The series being so long also seems to affect the studios that work on it and its directors, which becomes highly noticeable when the art turns into a weird copy of Naruto art with simplified character drawings and repetetive scenes. Honestly after having a 3 minute intro, a 1 minute summary of overall series plot and then a 5-8 minute previous episode summary, you are left with 15 minutes of "new" where in some episodes half of it is reused scenes from 3 minutes ago or from the previous episode.
So the point I am doing is: it is a good series, but the anime does no longer do it justice. So if you ever feel like the story and characters are starting to feel stale, you should probably dip into the manga, many of the repetetive scenes are not in it, and the art does not look like it got simplified over the years, but rather more polished. Though keep in mind that some episodes are actually original works of the author not included in the manga, they are usually good but they never get tied into the story so there is no problem missing it either.
