I'll start with the good stuff. Ichigo is a great main character. He is very charismatic, and he cares deeply for his friends and family. He tries to do the right thing and protect innocent people (even strangers). He has an immense amount of spiritual power which makes him a target for hollows (the evil spirits they fight in this series). I like that he becomes a shinigami (like a reaper basically) early on, and it's lightened a lot with good comedy. Friends are made through fighting a lot of the time so there are a lot of rivals that drive each other. There are a lot of colorful characters in this series. If anything, the characters save it from the flawed delivery of the story. There is a lot of mystery in this story which serves as the "hook" of the story.
Now for a little bad. I found the overall storytelling slowed down to a crawl often times. The story itself wasn't bad, just the way it was told became a problem for me. The concept was so interesting that I wanted to like it more than I actually did. A lot of questions get asked but not answered since Ichigo doesn't care. The amount of unanswered questions really started to bother me after a while.
Here's the biggest problem with Bleach. This anime series is a little shy of 50% filler. The problem with that is the main character is the type of hero that grows in strength at a constant accelerated rate. With filler arcs there is no growth (there literally cannot be in order to make sense in the main story). The filler is this anime's greatest downfall, especially because there are a couple of filler arcs that start in the middle of a main arc. They don't even squeeze them in properly. This makes it really hard to skip the filler. The first time through I watched all of the filler, and because I read the manga later I found that it could have been an 8 or 9. I give it a 7 if you skip filler, and it gets the slightly lower mark because if you skip filler you unfortunately miss bits and pieces of the main storyline as well.
In short, if you want a story with great action, great characters, good comedy, super powers, and you don't care too much about the story then this is for you. Bleach is a GOOD anime, and it's worth a watch so definitely don't skip it.
