Bleach: Sennen Kessen-hen - Soukoku-tan Episode 1 Discussion

@Koustubh without spoiling too much, its because of his schrift

Amazing opening, great ending, fantastic additional content with Uryuu vs Senjumaru, incredible animation & visuals...overall episode is absolutely phenomenal, big shame about the unnecesary 7 minutes recap at the beginning, 1/3 of the episode wasted feels awful and it's now obvious the production team had issues with Cour 2. [A] should've been the final episode of that season and we are paying the price for it here.

Regardless, the new content that is there is 10/10, so I would give it a 9/10 overall for the first episode.

Props to Kubo and the anime staff for fixing a lot of the bad things about the manga so far: Zero Squad are no longer frauds, Uryu's betrayal no longer feels halfcooked (he killed a Royal Guard member now) and is now possibly Top 10 in the verse now because of Antithesis (which is absolutely busted)

Hopefully they improve the bad stuff from this Cour 3 and especially the last one. They have delivered a better experience than the manga so far.

Quick question. Where did he kill a Royal Guard member? Looks like I missed this thing...

@Koustubh Senjumaru is part of the Soul King's Royal Guard and he kills her in this episode with an arrow to the heart (which is why her Bankai is disabled and lets the other quincies escape)

If you mean when is right after Ywhach kills Ichibei

@1ayoh OK, I see. So it will be revealed later right? Cause at first it kind of did not make sense that all of a sudden he easily was able to overpower Senjumaru but then I realized that Yhwach used Auswahlen and so maybe he might have gotten a good powerup.

Thanks for the reply though, appreciate it.

I read about people's experiences with the pre-screening so I already knew some of what this episode held. I'll start with the bad and then go to the good.

The bad

1) Half this episode was half of season 2's last episode, which, idk, sucks? I waited a long time and got half an episode lol. I heard a rumor that there will be an extra episode this cour (14 episodes instead of 13). If that's true, then I'm fine with only getting half an episode; otherwise, this is annoying because 52 episodes was already not enough for the amount of chapters it was adapting -- on top of which, the cour needs expanding on.

2) Ichibe's little dance was dumb. Sorry, it didn't slap for me.

3) Senjumaru's death was lame. There was no impact. She is a royal guard and got one shot by one of Uryu's arrows. I know Uryu is supposed to be stronger than he has been in the past, but I didn't feel that here. The arrow was the same dinky little one he's been shooting since the beginning of the series.

The good

1) The opening slaps hard. It looks really, really good. I hope this is a sign that this season will be higher quality.

2) The art, animation, and music were all really good. Speaking of art, Ichigo looked REALLY good when he was speaking with Ichibe. His face looked particularly handsome.

3) The CGI w/ futen looks amazing.

I'll give the episode a 6/10 only because of the runtime. I'm not a fan of cutting half the episode like this with last episode's 2nd half. I'm sure the season will get better as it treads on.

Even knowing Squad 0 would lose (Because then there would be nothing for Ichigo to do) it was epic to watch those battles.

To early to declare Bleach best anime of the season?

@mariox7777 This cour has just now surpassed Full Metal Alchemist and become #2 on MAL with an episode that is 1/3 recap and with a fight that was a couple pages long in the manga.

Aizen hasn't even had his big moment in this cour, nor have any of the BIG fights started yet, one of which is arguarbly one of the best in Bleach. Pretty sure to say Bleach being anime of the season and a strong contender for anime of the year is a lock.