The Shrine

Summary of the last 5 chapters

Chapter 1: We captains fight on even ground with you bad guys, rawr, oh noes, ominous bad guy can do better.
Chapter 2: Bad guys use bankai, oh noes good guys in trouble, ominious ending.
Chapter 3: Good guy prepares bankai which he didn't before for no good reason but of course doesn't use it this chapter
Chapter 4: Good guy uses bankai, and apparently wins. Good guy #2 prepares bankai, yay more preparation
Chapter 5: Good guy uses bankai, but we still don't know if that equals win until next chapter because she used it at the end, yaaaay. Next week, we find out if that captain wins, and then we'll see either A) New bad guy fight, or B) New hero step in for the captain who failed, and probably start back at the cycle up above somewhere.

This manga drags so fucking much, the action is decent, but most of the chapter is them explaining exactly how their ridiculous super powers work or WHY they're supposed to win or didn't use it in the first place

At least in Dragon Ball when Goku punched somebody in the face really hard they'd either A) Have a look of getting owned, or B) Just stand there and not move, it's straight forward and simple. Goku punches bad guy, bad guy whelps in pain, Goku can hurt them. Goku punches bad guy, bad guy stands there, Goku is in trouble.

In Bleach it's like "Ok super special sword attack is coming, AND THIS IS WHY IT'S GONNA HURT." You'd think after 360 chapters Bleach would establish some kind of rules or sense of how it works. Like even in Naruto, as random as the special abilities are you can categorize them into eye techniques, illusions, clones, elemental shit, etc. Bleach...doesn't make sense. It doesn't even pretend to.

I think the rule 'he who bankais first always loses' is still pretty reliable.

I saw someone describe Bleach as just random people posing and that seems to be a good way to describe it.

And I think Aizen is going on his second year of 'being trapped for a while'. Or as the Chinese board puts it, he went to Planet Namek and probably won't be back anytime soon.

I hate the manga convention of just exponentially raising how powerful the main character and the villains are after each story arc. It would be far more entertaining for me to see a weaker hero defeat a more powerful villain through intellect, strategy, mastery of whatever, or something else along these lines. This idea comes out pretty often in Berserk.

Also, yeah, Bleach is pretty bad and your chapter by chapter description is pretty spot on.

Shrinweck wrote:I hate the manga convention of just exponentially raising how powerful the main character and the villains are after each story arc. It would be far more entertaining for me to see a weaker hero defeat a more powerful villain through intellect, strategy, mastery of whatever, or something else along these lines. This idea comes out pretty often in Berserk.

Also, yeah, Bleach is pretty bad and your chapter by chapter description is pretty spot on.

Problem is Bleach also have these retarded abilities that instant kills you, like Saifon's 2-hit kill. I guess it'll just magically not work on anybody that is deemed as 'important' but they don't really have a good way to explain themselves out of this.

Manga: suffering from balance issues since at least the late 1980s.

(When was DBZ first published, anyway? One could make the case that it really ushered in the age of "OVER NINE THOUSAND", so to speak.)

DBZ doesn't really have balancing issues. If you 9000 power, the next guy just has 90000 and it's understood 90000 > 9000.

In Bleach, you're talking about Saifon unconditionally kills anybody if she hits them in the same spot twice. Of course she make sure she tells everyone that she has this ability just in case they don't get it. And of course she never actually hits anybody important twice in the same spot. One of the captain has researched this poison that'd take out an Espada, but I'm pretty sure if he used it on say, Aizen, it'd be like "Oops this poison doesn't work on Aizen!' It seems like anybody with a Bankai that isn't just a straight power up has some kind of special autowin ability, but they're very good at telling you how to avoid it!

Don wrote:DBZ doesn't really have balancing issues. If you 9000 power, the next guy just has 90000 and it's understood 90000 > 9000.

In Bleach, you're talking about Saifon unconditionally kills anybody if she hits them in the same spot twice. Of course she make sure she tells everyone that she has this ability just in case they don't get it. And of course she never actually hits anybody important twice in the same spot. One of the captain has researched this poison that'd take out an Espada, but I'm pretty sure if he used it on say, Aizen, it'd be like "Oops this poison doesn't work on Aizen!' It seems like anybody with a Bankai that isn't just a straight power up has some kind of special autowin ability, but they're very good at telling you how to avoid it!

This, there's no rhyme or reason to Bleach's combat. It just IS, and there's always something we don't know about that comes out of nowhere to win the day, and the stuff we do know about becomes useless after the first time it's used, meaning we have to wait for new random secret ability to appear or the person fighting loses.

DB & DBZ were pretty simple by comparison, saiyans have limitless potential so Goku & Vegeta and their kids could get endlessly stronger. It's simple, it makes sense, it's an established rule of the show, so when they slaughter all the inferior aliens, kill off their clones, and knock out an ancient evil nobody is surprised.

In Bleach you don't know why the fuck who is stronger then who or why, so when Ichigo goes Hollow Saiyan 5 and loses to Holllow saiyan 2s, while the Captain sayian 3s are beating the hollow level 4s, there are questions raised.

Summary of Bleach

Ichigo I hear something
I need to find Rukia, Renji, goddamnit! uhhhh
Holy fuck, what the fuck is that thing
What the fuck is this place
What's goin on here? Hmmm
The hollows are evolving to what?
And who the hell is that guy?
And what the fuck are those things? Plural!
Damnit Renji where's Rukia!
Boy this place looks pretty old...almost...too old
huh?
What the hell was that? Under the building...
Rukia! Huhhhhhh
A giant....hallow!?
Huhhhhhh!
huhhhhhh
Who the fuck is that guy?
Keep fighting I am Aizen and I rule all
Oh that's Captain Aizen Ichigo
We're gonna ride what?
Hold shit we won
Goddamnit Ichigo what's going on here?
I have no idea.

It's also pretty funny whenever Ichigo is about to die he just does a transformation and beats up the other guy up, and then when he goes out of the transformation he'd be like OMG that wasn't fair here hit me some to make it fair. I guess this is like back in DBZ when Goku would let his enemy hit him if he had some help. Difference is that Goku is usually a good match 1vs1 whereas Ichigo gets his help when he's about to die, and during his transformation he usually kills the other guy or at least beats them up to the verge of death, and then tries to act like it needs to be fair fight.

It's not even clear to me Aizen could take on one of Ichigo's transformation(s).

Actually one of the threads asking what good is Aizen's ability against one of Ichigo's higher Super Saiyan forms. He seems to pretty much just destroy everything in his vision without concern, so Aizen can pretend to be a rock but then Super Saiyan Ichigo would just destroy the rock too.

Of course Aizen's ability is totally bogus too if you look at some of the flashbacks, like how he said he hyponotized all the Lieutenants and Captains, which means his ability would have no effect on anybody below a Lieutenant (because they were never hynoptized). So all you need to beat him is bring a newbie and he'd be like "hey guys that rock there over there is really Aizen!". And yet it clearly works on people who he has never hynoptized anyway, so why even bother with the process?

In the last panel of Shonen Jump this week, at the end of bleach there's an editor note, "What the hell(on earth) was that?" I'm glad to see the confusion is spreading.

The 'what the heck is that' is just in reaction of what the character said.

I saw this post about how the manga drags on so long, the Anime is forced to cover 2 weeks of content in one episode because even after you apply your usual techniques like flashback, character introduction, what-has-happened-before, and so on there still isn't enough content to put 1 week's worth of manga in one episode.

I've tried this before, but honest question: If it's so bad, why do you still watch/read it?

Kupek wrote:I've tried this before, but honest question: If it's so bad, why do you still watch/read it?

Well for me, I've stopped bothering with the anime, and I honestly check the manga because I want to see how badly it can drag and then talk about it with the other people who see it drags too and make fun of it.

Kupek wrote:I've tried this before, but honest question: If it's so bad, why do you still watch/read it?

Sometimes you get kinda attached to it and wanna see where it goes. After 200+ episodes, it's enough of a committment that you don't want to miss anything good that may happen.

Bleach is dull and drags a lot now, bu tit's not "bad" per se. It's just bad in comparison to how good it was or can be. Same with Naruto although it's showing signs of pulling out of its slump now.

And really, there's little else to replace these shows right now other than the new Full Metal.

There seems to be nothing good worth reading anyway.

I'm not attached to any of this stuff. I just want to see how bad it can go.

Don wrote:There seems to be nothing good worth reading anyway.

Maybe if you limit your reading to manga. But, you know... books. I hear they're rad.

I'm just baffled because I don't have the time to read/watch/play things I like. I can't imagine making time to consume things I don't like.

Kupek wrote:

Don wrote:There seems to be nothing good worth reading anyway.

Maybe if you limit your reading to manga. But, you know... books. I hear they're rad.

I'm just baffled because I don't have the time to read/watch/play things I like. I can't imagine making time to consume things I don't like.

It takes like 3-5 minutes or less to read a chapter of Bleach heh.

Manga takes no time to consume, period. It takes me about 3 minutes to finish the average volume of manga (8-10 weeks worth of serial).

I don't actually watch Anime because it usually takes 24 minutes to go through a 24 minute Anime and I don't have that much time.

On a side note, I don't dislike Bleach. I think it's hilariously bad and it's a quality of its own. Out of the stuff I've read recently, GTO is probably the only thing good enough to be qualified as a 'dislike' which implies it is actually good enough to be disliked as opposed to something you open up and laugh at how stupid it is and then be done with it.

Kupek wrote:

Don wrote:There seems to be nothing good worth reading anyway.

Maybe if you limit your reading to manga. But, you know... books. I hear they're rad.

I'm just baffled because I don't have the time to read/watch/play things I like. I can't imagine making time to consume things I don't like.