sanquin said:
I don't think it's worth giving another try. I thought it to be an incredibly good anime at first. Then I found anime like Log Horizon, Fate/Zero, Hellsing Ultimate, Accel World, Soul Eater, Code Geass, Gurren Langann, One Piece, etc. Now I see it as that average nostalgic anime I grew up with. As it was one of the first anime I saw, not counting pokemon and DBZ. If anything, I'd recommend Fairy Tail or One Piece over Bleach.
The thing is Bleach
was a very good anime/manga. There was a reason it became on of the big tree along Naruto and One Piece. The problem is that Kubo had a plot planned out until the end of the Soul Society Arc and its big twist (which was really good, both the arc and the twist). However he really didn't have anything else.
Not only that, with the Soul Society arc done he suddenly had about fifty new characters with their own back-stories, fun powers ripe for display and, most importantly, rabid fanbase that wanted to see them in favor of some other characters. Because of that characters who used to be main characters, such as Chad and Orihime and even Rukia got demoted to completely ineffectual side-characters facing off against (and usually losing to) gimmicky side-villains while the popular captains like Kenpachi, Byakuya and Hitsugaya took center stage... Only to be side-tracked when even more characters entered the fray when the Arrancar arc started bloating the cast even further with the Arrancar, the Visored and all the other random minibosses.
I would say this is the reason why Bleach fell apart: Kubo loves creating distinct, over-the-top character designs and powers, and he wants his characters to demonstrate these powers. Because of this there are always huge mobs of new, over-designed enemies showing up for the heroes to defeat in long battles, but when those enemies become popular they join the cast and therefore there have to be even more new enemies so they can show off too, and then some of those guys also join the main cast and so on and so forth, leading to a slow but steady balooning of pointless fights with increasingly implausible powers. This leaves everything else; plot, characters and general narrative sense secondary in service of churning out even more characters and combat-powers (which is the reason behind the blatant rehashing of old plots), and Kubo could get away with all of this because early Bleach was good enough to cater enough of a fan-support to make him untouchable by the editors.
Hell, in a way Kubo is still untouchable. Bleach is consistently tanking the Shounen Jump rankings, but they keep publishing it just because it's Bleach, a once popular and still widely recognized brand.
