Bleach

[Dracos]

Now, admittingly, it's not too often there's reviews written for these types of anime.  They're exceedingly long, sometimes hard to break into seasons for review, and go through lots of swings.  Even after such a long train of episodes as this it's easy to get caught in writing a review and watching them do another 300 eps.

Personally, I think the jury though is safe in coming in.  Bleach is shonen, in case you somehow were totally unaware.  It subscribes rather strongly to it, for those who like or dislike that kind of thing.  You got your hero.  Your mystic specialty for him.  Your set of allies.  Your pseudo-love interest/vulnerable female who's too smart about things.  Your monsters of the week.  Your folks staring awed at the heroes revealed superpowers.  Your silly almost totally ineffectual comic relief.  It's a formula and inclusive of arena style fights, it doesn't stray too much from it for a fair while and has, at its base, all the benefits and flaws off such.

I was going to summarize the basic gist but, this does it pretty well if you're unfamiliar with it and introduces the first dozen charaters or so.  So, the question becomes: Is this good shonen?  I'd say it's acceptable, but not truly good.

So far, there's been three real 'arcs' and I'll discuss them in turn.  The first is the casual opening arc.  Here the writers spilled their load rapidly, introducing new characters almost every episode and detailing hollows.  It was also in many ways the better part of the series as the characters were reasonably neat characters (yay busty Orihime!) and filled in their spots in the hiearchy.   They moved a touch fast and didn't show much foresight towards later arcs, but  overall, Ichigo and Rukia made an enjoyable enough duo to run through and their interactions with the others were fun.

Then they screwed it all up.  The next arc was the deathgod arc where the deathgods came to recover  Rukia, leaving Ichigo broken on the ground.  This arc, for starters, involved quadrupling the cast size while slowly inching much of the cast off the screen.  Besides this transforming 'too fast' pacing into 'way way too slow' pacing, it also buried the show in deathgod politics that I really don't think anyone cared about and made this reviewer wonder how deathgod society managed to function with so many folks ready to backstab or kill each other at a moments opportunity.  That said, what carries this arc is that it is effectively the shonen tournament arc.  You know, the one they always have?  There's some good fights here and it keeps it going.  The arc ends on a bad note with them revealing some miserably lame treachery deal by a few of the deathgod captains and linking them up with the hollows (who had been vanished for some 40 episodes of screentime) but the day ends well and the heroes all get to go home.  Notably, it's during this arc that they start ruining characters.  Not all, but most characters get matches that do pretty much everything they do or simply outclass them in coolness.  It's sort of annnoying really.  But, to reiterate, the fights are pretty darn nifty and carry this arc and if that's what you're there for, there's good stuff to watch.

Then comes the Vampire, I mean, Bount arc.  This involves the introduction of some cute comic relief plushies as well as the classic 'introduce new characters' problem.  Primarily, that all the old ones promptly reduced in competence and intelligence while accenting old 'mediocre' areas to provide room for the new characters to fill in those spots.  This I found pretty painful, though not as annoying as hollows continuing to be dropped despite the huge separation between their last appearance.  The vamps, despite being super-rare almost never seen beings, suddenly appear en masse with 'strange' superpowers that the formerly very capable group seems barely able to manage one of.

This is where episode seventy lies with show on a steady decline and the mangaers stating it doesn't get good again for a while, if that.

I'm going to have to suggest passing on this unless you're hungry for shonen style stuff since it really doesn't match up to what they could do.

Dracos

Admin Edit: Topic Name edited so that it can be used as a general review thread as opposed to being restricted to a specific number. For future reference this particular review covers up to episode 70.

[Liddo-kun]

The horrible Bount arc, which made me stop watching the anime all-together, could have been a product of the fact that the anime caught up to the manga storyline.  So I think, rather than spoil the manga for readers, they decided to stall for time with the Bount arc, or simply veer off in another direction from the manga all together.

Unfortunately, said direction took them into the thick of a dense forest, whereupon they crashed into a tree and ass-ploded.

C'est la vie.

[Smarmy Lil' Goblin]

I haven't seen the Bount arc yet, but if it's as terrible as you say it is, I think I'll go ahead and save myself the agony; the Soul society has been painful enough with the plot holes and other faults T.T.

[Dracos]

It technically improves afterwards, were one to skip 40ish eps to the mid 110s, but drives right back into filler soon afterwards.