Has it really taken four years to finish the final arc? Imagine the hyper-shitty filler if the anime wasn't put out of its misery around the same time.
(The Bount and Captain Amagi filler arcs were decent (for filler) but everything afterwords went downhill
fast. Muramasa and his zanpakto mind control powers could have been handled much better, and the recycled plot of the next arc is where I flipped the table on the anime. Generic zanpakto are randomly turning evil now? Screw you!)
circularlogic88 said:
Good. Stopped reading it when they revealed Ichigo's mom was a Quincy, thereby making him a Quincy on top of a Shinigami, and a Vizard, and a Fullbringer, and a weird product of a Hollow attack(? Admittedly I stopped reading around this point).
The fights were becoming formulaic with characters seemingly having the upper hand and then "you fell for my trap card" nonsense ensuing several times to elongate battles.
You could tell Tite Kubo ran out of steam around the end of the Las Noches and False Karakura Town arcs. Orihime actually went through character regression with her time in Las Noches. Fullbringer arc might as well not have happened apart from explaining how Chad and Orihime's abilities manifested. I really would have figured a guy who could rewrite history as his power would have had a bigger impact than next to nothing at all. And Ichigo just became such a miserable character to follow throughout most of these arcs I've mentioned.
Finding out Ichigo is part-everything is about where I stopped, as well. The Fullbringer arc was hard enough to finish. While the first few Quincy invasion chapters almost brought back what made Bleach interesting, more drawn out battles with the excessively numbered side characters and finding out Ichigo's mother died (and Uryu's as well) not because of the hollow attack, but because the new villain is an overpowered life-sucking asshole, did it for me.
It did go on for too many arcs. The Jump execs should have listened to Kubo's original desire to finish the manga with Azien's defeat. Instead, he had to write a quick end to that, take a break to think of some new story arc to tack on and give us another unnecessary manga-story-time-skip. They should have just let him follow through with the original slightly longer plans for the Azien plotline and commissioned him to make a sequel series where, I don't know, Ichigo and Orihime's kid has a has kid with an arrancar and he or she is the new hero that fights some dumb new spirit overlord.
Super Cyborg said:
[plot summary of cool-sounding battles]
That makes me want to actually finish reading the manga when it Kubo is done with it. Kenpachi and Mayuri are two of the best written weirdos Bleach has to offer.
Everything about Chad, Orohime, and Uryu was pointless again. Main bad guy can change the future to his will, and took away all of Ichigos powers, where Ichigo gained all of them back the very next chapter.
But that makes me only want to read a summary, in order to skip over the useless fluff I've come to hate about many shonen mangas. I should have seen the thing about Ichigo's powers coming, though. It's a been running gag since the first few chapters for him to lose powers every arc or so and regain them, with extras!