Marcus Mattsson

I’m very fascinated by manga and anime, recently I’ve wanted to read and watch more of it, and I had heard about the popular manga-turned-anime Bleach, so I started watching it about a month ago…

… and it’s actually very entertaining, it’s about this 15-year old boy Ichigo Kurosaki, who is forced to become a substitute Death God, a warrior who slays hollows, evil ghosts that used to be deceased human souls, that lost their hearts to despair or remained in the real world for too long. Ichigo gets his new powers from Rukia Kuchiki, a real Death God who transfers her powers to Ichigo because she is wounded in a fight with a hollow. Annoyed at first, Ichigo eventually accepts the duty as a Death God, performing so-called soul burials on wayward souls and hunting down hollows, cleansing their spirits and sending them back to Soul Society, the home of souls and Death Gods.

In the second season (or ‘arc’) it all gets a lot more exciting, Rukia is taken back to Soul Society and sentenced to death, because transferring Death God powers to a human is forbidden. The second and third arc is about Ichigo travelling to Soul Society trying to rescue her. So far there are six arcs and I saw the last episode of the third arc today (which means I’ve seen 60 episodes so far, damn).

The coolest part about Bleach is the fighting and build-ups before the fights. The show is very well animated and there are a lot of scenes with powerful characters fighting the less powerful (or so they think) Ichigo and then going “holy shit you kick ass”, kind of like Neo going apeshit in the end of The Matrix. It’s cliché, but for some reason it never gets old, especially not when it’s presented so great. As mentioned there’s a lot of these sequences in Bleach, the second and third arc primarily focuses on Ichigo training, thus building up incredible powers and then gaining the ability to defeat characters that kicked his ass at some earlier point in the series.

But the fights would be nothing without the additional, minor storylines, for example, two fairly unknown characters are about to fight, but before they start we see a long flashback about their history, how they meet, who they are, etc. and it makes the battle more exciting. There’s also a lot of background information about the main characters, and that’s the second reason why I’m enjoying Bleach so much. Some of the episodes are kind of stupid though, they suddenly focus on something completely different than the main storyline, and the Japanese humor and drawing style is a bit too much once in a while, but the majority of the episodes are really worth a watch.

Bleach: 1^st to 3^rd arc: 8/10.

If you’re interested, you can watch the first episode right here.

More information about the show can be found on WikiPedia, here.