Recently I’ve watched over 100 episodes of Bleach. I did a lot of skipping mind you and a lot of fast forwarding, but over four days I went through about 100 episodes. From the end of the “Arrancar” arc somewhere around 140 all the way to 220. I skipped past the previous 20 episodes to kind of refresh myself. So I think it’s time again to give a good lesson about anime and where a lot of things come from.

In Dragonball Z you have every anime “trope” out there. Ranging from Moe to Henshin. Here is a quick list:

• Moe: A lot of the females range from Tsundere to midly submissive.
• Henshin: The great Saiya-man arc.
• Robots: There were mechs and there were androids.
• Burning Passion: 50 episodes of powering up.
• Impossible to Fight Enemies: yeah, Freiza and Buu are two good starts.
• Henchmen of varying difficulty levels: mmhmm
• Everyone getting split up and fighting different enemies: Why does this still happen?
• Anime Hair: Everyone in it.
• Bishies: Yeah
• Blade Reflections: Yep.
• Blood: lots of it
• Circle of Friendships: YEAHHH
• Death is Meaningless: Yep
• Defeat Means Friendships: mmmhmm
• Afros: YEAH
• I AM YOUR OPPONENT: YEAH
• Invisible to Normals: why why why why do I have to keep typing yeah in some entertaining way?
• Katanas: a few
• Hopping on Roofs: yeah
• Rescuing people: yeah
• School Episodes: yeah YES YES YES YES
• I even think there was a hot spring episode or something
• The trope from TV Tropes where it’s called “Vegeta and Kakarot” or basically two rivals who are beyond rivals like Sasuke and Naruto or Yusuke and Kuwabara or Ichigo and Uryuu and blah blah blah.
• They go into freaking space.
• Time Travel

There are episodes involving schools, episodes in space, dimensional travel, tournaments, superheroes, flying cars, technology, magical healing powers, time travel, and the list keeps going on and on.

Anime can always be traced back to DBZ in some way. There isn’t an anime series out there that has some kind of DBZ in it. DBZ may be lambasted for being stupidly long and too mainstream, but it’s the father of a lot of modern anime. Remember though that DBZ wasn’t first in any respects, it just stole every idea in the book and jammed them together. It’s a good representation of anime though.

The game, as mentioned earlier, features almost the full cast from Weekly Shonen Jump ranging from Naruto, Bleach, One Piece to Gintama and Dragonball Z. Each various series has a cast of characters that can be chosen to be played as either actual combatants, helpers (who come in, do something, leave), or as a form of a passive buff to one character or all. These characters are referenced as koma and come in those three types (battle koma (actual combatants), help koma (helpers), and support koma (passive buff).

These “koma” are laid out on a board and are arranged like pages of a manga. These are considered a “deck” or “panel”. You can choose different kinds or for some missions the game has a pre-set one already made for you. The fight plays out very Super Smash Bros. Melee like with you battling, using helpers, switching characters, and doing other things with the characters from Shonen Jump.

The game is completely awesome. For instance, you can be Goku. Fighting your enemies, you summon Light Yagami from Death Note. He writes their names down in his Death Note and they die 10 seconds later (we assume 45 in the game). Then, you switch Gintama. You hop on your scooter and dash into 3 enemies pushing 2 of them off the cliff. These enemies of course are Naruto, Luffy, and Vegeta.

This kind of gameplay is just amazing. For the DS that is. Each match usually lasts no more then 3 minutes so you can play, put down, pick up, play some more, put down. You don’t need to know much Japanese (but I urge an FAQ for assembling decks do you know what you’re doing). Doing Kenshin’s ultimate attack, followed by Goku’s Spirit Bomb, followed by some good ‘ol Death Note action is amazing.

If you can import and are even a remote fan of Shounen Jump I’d pick this up. If you don’t like Shounen Jump then I can understand skipping it. If you’re netural I would still say get it for the fun the fighting game presents however it’s way more enjoyable if you know a few of the characters (like Naruto and One Piece).

Upgrading your characters, unlocking new stages, and just battling will consume a ton of time. I think I’ve put about 5 hours into it and am at the second stage of worlds. Although I’m doing a lot of collecting and mission completing. There is just a lot to do.

It’s kinda expensive, ranging between 30 and 50 bucks imported. It’s also only for the Nintendo DS and not everyone has one of those (shame on you). You should get it though.

If I had a solid rating system, I’d say 5 out of 5 or 9 out of 10. It’s just a really solid game. Only thing lacking, of course, is the music. Totally not gar enough.

Bleach episode 121 is out by Dattebayo (awhile ago at that). It’s well, an amazing episode. To be honest I don’t really feel that Bleach is worthy of an essay of words on why it’s good so I’m just going to cut this short and give its rank: B+

Decent episode, lots of action, plot development, lack of filler characters, and some other stuff make it a pretty decent episode.

Bleach 120 was very slow paced, uninteresting, and lacking of any kind of action. You can download it here. I’ve been skipping Bleach since I heard of the episode where they’re expanding on manga flashbacks. This episode was… just disappointing. I expected more action, more burning justice, more epicness and not just characters talking to one another and the filler characters helping extend how long the scene runs.

It felt more of a waste of time then anything else. I mean, sure anime is suppose to waste time, but when there isn’t something interesting going on or some kind of plot advancement that could be handled within the episode ALONG with some action then yeah…

I’m really hoping that I just came in during a budget episode and that they’re not going to keep up this poor quality and pacing in order to conserve manga material (which has a year at like a few chapters an episode). The filler characters are still very annoying for anyone who has read this in the manga.

Oh well, next episode should contain something more substantial hopefully. Then we’ll move into the training arc of any major battle arc that Shounen shows have which will accept this pacing a lot better then the hot blooded fighting scenes.

To elaborate more, they are back to the manga arc, but it’s kind of like Kenshin. Soul Society was the arc and now that it’s over you aren’t really going to top it. I’m not following the manga right now, but from what I understand it got pretty boring for awhile.