Review for Bleach: Series 14 Part 2 (3 Discs) (UK)

Introduction

Can you believe it’s been six months between releases of Bleach? Do you even remember what was happening in the show back in September? Do you even care? I certainly don’t, although I will never be mistaken for the world’s biggest Bleach fan. The thing is that I have to review this release regardless, but I don’t have the willpower to go back and re-watch the requisite number of episodes to get me back up to scratch with the show and the characters. I’ll just have to plough on regardless and hope that I get back into the swing of things as we go along. The first episode in this collection doesn’t help with Franken Ichigo, Succubus Rukia, Count Uryu Dracula, and Renji the Pirate Mummy starring in another annoying instalment of filler.


You’d think that a teenager’s life would be complicated enough if he could speak to ghosts. But that was only the beginning for Ichigo Kurosaki. When he literally bumped into a Shinigami named Rukia Kuchiki, he was introduced to a whole new world. The Shinigami’s mission is to guide forlorn spirits known as Wholes to the Soul Society, and protect them and the living from Hollows, perverted spirits that have become monsters that prey on other souls, living or dead. They are not supposed to let the living know about this supernatural world, but not only does Ichigo see Rukia, circumstances force her to give him her powers, and train him to be a Shinigami while she regains her strength. Through their adventures, Ichigo learns that his classmates Orihime and Chad are similarly bestowed with spiritual abilities. He also meets Uryu Ishida, the last Quincy, heir to a tribe of spiritual warriors from the human world that once sought out and destroyed Hollows, before the Shinigami in turn eradicated them for disrupting the balance.


So where were we? Ichigo and his friends went to Hueco Mundo, the Hispanic land of the Hollows to rescue Orihime, who’d been kidnapped by the Soul Society traitor Aizen. He’s been turning Hollows into human looking Arrancars armed with Zanpakutos of their own. Ichigo has been training to become a Visored, which is like coming at an Arrancar from the other direction. Aizen’s plan becomes clear, he wants to take over the Soul Society, but to do that he has to attack Ichigo’s hometown first in the world of the living. At the end of the previous volume, after delivering a kicking to a major section of the Shinigami, he unveiled his plan, and left Ichigo and his friends trapped in Hueco Mundo to attack Karakura town. To forestall Aizen’s plan, the Shinigami came up with a plan of their own, setting up a mechanism to transfer the real Karakura Town to the Soul Society, and creating a fake town in which to engage Aizen and his minions in battle. But Aizen’s ready for this, as he and his Arrancars face the top Captains of the Soul Society.


In the last collection, the Arrancars all fell down, most of the Soul Reapers did, and so did the Visoreds, pretty much leaving Aizen, nursing delusions of godhood to head to the Soul Society to lay waste to the real Karakura town, and also pretty much leaving just Ichigo Kurosaki standing in his way. I’m a little skimpy on the details after all this time, but I do remember that the last collection ended on a damp squib of filler, and that’s how we pick up this collection too.

13 episodes across 3 discs await in Series 14 Part 2, episodes 304-316, subtitled The Downfall of the Arrancars 2. They’re still falling down. Part 1 was an aberration I guess, as we get back to the inflated disc count and the £5 extra on the R.R.P. for the privilege of having one extra episode.

Picture

Bleach has now gone widescreen. It’s now in the modern TV friendly aspect ratio of 1.78:1 anamorphic. And that’s the end of the good news. The last few releases of Bleach via Madman Entertainment had native PAL transfers, 25 frames per second with 4% PAL speedup, but of high resolution and free of any standards conversion artefacts. Not anymore. With Kazé’s release of Bleach, we’re back to the bad old days of NTSC-PAL standards conversions. It’s worse in my opinion, as my limited experience of Kazé output has shown that while their Blu-rays are sweet, and their PAL DVDs are acceptable, their NTSC-PAL conversions leave a lot to be desired, and are the least impressive of any distributor that I have reviewed.


Incidentally Bleach’s 1.78:1 anamorphic image is now one of those few NTSC-PAL conversions that convert by simply repeating every 24th frame to create the 25th PAL frame. That explains the rhythmic judder in pans and scrolls, exactly once a second. On the bright side this means that the ghosting and blended frames that afflicted the earlier Kazé Bleach releases is gone, but the judder is annoying, and the image quality still looks of such low resolution that you’d still think it was a standards conversion.

Sound

There are some positives to be had in the audio department. The discs now have the surround flag activated, so you now have DD 2.0 Surround English and Japanese audio. It sounds exactly the same in practice however. More significant is that Kazé provide translated subtitles for the Japanese audio, and a signs only English track for the English audio. This season sees some new theme songs debuted for the series, but unlike the Madman discs, the songs don’t have subtitle translations for the lyrics. These being Kazé discs, you can’t change audio or subtitles on the fly, so Hard of Hearing English dub fans are out of luck. I’ve also noticed that the subtitles aren’t overscan friendly, with letters disappearing off the edge of the screen on my old CRT TV.

Extras

You’ve probably already heard me whinge about Kazé discs and UPOPs, so consider it whinged again. These discs are locked up tighter than Fort Knox, and I had to guess at the run time for the episodes.

Kazé don’t put separate Bleach trailers on their discs, and neither do they offer a line art gallery. All you get are karaoke versions of the credit sequences, minus the credit text, but with a romanji (Japanese in English script) burnt in subtitle track that insists that you sing along. The discs have trailers for Bakuman Season 1 (they’re still trying to shift this trainwreck), Bleach the Movie Hellverse, Black Lagoon, Berserk the Movie 1, Persona 4: The Animation, and Nura Rise of the Yokai Clan.

Conclusion

Stick a fork in it. Bleach is done! This collection contains the conclusion of the last, complete canon story arc in Bleach, the Arrancar saga. With this release, the most annoying villain of the franchise gets his comeuppance, satisfaction is doled out to fans that have been following this particular story since the Soul Society Arc way back in Season 2, and you can, in a way underline the story as done and dusted, albeit with an annoying cliff-hanger. That the Bleach anime continues for another 50 episodes, another four potential releases from Kazé should really just be accepted as an afterthought. After all, what follow from now until the end of the series are 26 episodes of filler including a made for anime story arc, and the first 24 episodes of the next canon arc, which most certainly isn’t completed in the Bleach television series. All that’s left is an enigmatic hope that one day, more will be animated. It’s been three years so far... no new Bleach, while Gintama has been cancelled and renewed twice in that time.


I have to say that the conclusion of the Arrancar storyline went off like a damp squib for me, not at all helped by the two episodes of filler that I had to sit through first. If you think that Ichigo’s Arabian Nights adventure was bad in the previous collection, the Hammer Horror one here is worse, while what follows is a bit of nothing about Hisagi’s crush on Rangiku. The Arrancar storyline is resolved in the next four episodes, with one episode of ‘what the...?’ as I tried desperately to remember what was going on having been away from the show for six months. Basically Ichigo is training inside his head, while the few remaining conscious residents of Karakura City (Ichigo’s friends conveniently) are on the run from Aizen, who’s on a slow motion ominous stalking of the empty city. The real interesting revelation, and tying up of a loose end here is Gin Ichimaru’s storyline, as we learn the events of his past that made him all squinty and enigmatic.


Ichigo shows up at the end of episode 308 when all seems lost, and he spends the next episode alternating levelling up with Aizen, until he gets to the point where he can kick his butt. I have to admit that I was surprisingly disappointed with this, in a show that can stretch a battle across two seasons, can pad out with recaps and flashbacks until you’ve forgotten completely what the combatants were fighting about. It takes just a single episode for Ichigo to beat Aizen, and I felt oddly let down by this, even though the animation is concise, action packed, and well edited (and still padded out with one flashback). I expected Aizen’s demise to be longer, more protracted.


But the next major story development is that to beat Aizen, Ichigo has sacrificed his Soul Reaper abilities, a sacrifice that will be drawn out by the next 26 episodes of filler, before they actually go, but it’s one way to beat the problem of completely levelling up out of all realistic comprehension. The alternate would be the Dragon Ball Z route of having Ichigo being so strong that he has to fight in another reality for fear of vaporising the one he’s in. It’s a convenient reset button. Episode 310 is the aftermath, the epilogue to the Arrancar storyline, where all this is made to sink in.


And now we begin the next stretch of filler, all 26 episodes. The six we get here are all inconsequential, nothing episodes, played for laughs, and not even exploring the side characters all that well, the way that earlier filler did. There’s one episode with a wimpy member’ of Squad 11 that turned out quite well, but an Omaeda, ‘soul reaper who cried wolf’ episode is just silly, another Konso Kop Karakurizer episode is pitiful, the Kon falling for the girl with the big boobs who’s plagued by Hollows is watchable, but I have to admit that I snored through the final two episodes in this collection. Two more collections of filler, followed by two collections of canon that will leave you dangling remain.