Bleach / First Impressions

Summary:

Ichigo has come with all the female Shinigami to the beach after their Soul Society pool got destroyed by Byakuya. Renji and some of the other guys have come along too, as have Inoue, Sado, and Ishida. With everyone gathered, Ukitake announces a seaside art contest with a cash prize, and several of the Shinigami are enticed enough to participate, including Rukia and Byakuya. It’s Kiyone and Sentarou who inadvertently end up building a sand coffin around a sleeping Ukitake that judge Unohana thinks are the winners though. All of this is interrupted when a monster suddenly attacks and captures Nanao and Isane. Unohana isn’t surprised because she had heard of a strong Hollow here, they have a hard time fighting it because it can absorb spirit attacks. A second one then appears, but fortunately Yoruichi and Soifon show up and are able to use direct attacks to take both down. Afterward, Ukitake wakes back up and, with the other captains who knew about this, explains that this was actually all part of the watermelon splitting activity. These particular watermelon monsters were created by the Research and Development Institute to fight Hollows, and Ichigo and company have several more to take out.

Preview

As a fun fanservice episode, I think this worked quite well. Even though I was familiar with the omake chapter from volume 29 of the manga, I found the Ukitake coffin joke to be hilarious and really couldn’t stop laughing at how they did it here. Hitsugaya serving as basically an ice machine was pretty amusing too. And as expected, there was plenty of cleavage and revealing swimsuits, and they even kept in the breast buckets joke and added tentacle monsters. So I really don’t have much to complain about this, and I suspect that a fun episode like this will look really good when we’re deep in the anime original stuff that’s coming soon.

Speaking of coming soon, it looks like next week will be another one-shot about Keigo’s sister Mizuho (we already had one back in episode 133), and the new ED should start the week after that, probably along with the new anime original arc.

45 Comments

  3. Well this episode was good but does anyone know what the anime original stuff will be or no clue out there? what i would really want to see animated some day if they ever make it manga wise or anime wise how ichigo’s father ended up being a shinigami and how he lost his power i would watch that for sure wouldn’t anyone who likes the show well thanks for reading this post.

    Chrome
    Reply

  9. It sounds like the next Ikkaku episode will be anime original, but I never read any of the omake chapters, so I can’t say for sure.

    So. Bleach now has a proper Beach Episode. 😀 I’m glad they incorporated the swimsuits of the female characters from that one illustration that has been circulating over the net for ages! 😀 Plus, the Hollow being a watermelon was clever, and they even had it being pretty pervy!! Come on… it grabbed three of the women, but ditched Renji? 😀

    Despite the fanservice being a definite plus, just the way everyone appeared together seemed very awkward. In a canon ep, Byakuya wouldn’t be caught dead playing with his sister on a beach! Also, by the way this ep wrapped up, I was expecting it to be a two-parter, but the preview showed otherwise… which made the To Be Continued label very confusing. Oh well.

    starss
    Reply

  12. Male characters:
    Swear all the vice captains are ripped… even more so than the captains

    Female characters:
    Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm… more Nemu wudav been better >:) (Y)

    brianleung8912
    Reply

  23. I had completely forgotten that there was actually an omake about the beach untill i seen the coffin and the sand creatures by rukia and byakuya…

    But, tits on the front page still doesn’t balance out the man-ass from the other post =/

    Neo_NMO
    Reply

  28. They show this much skin for this episode but they censor Halibel’s outfit… Hm… That’s kinda sad…

    Anyways, really good fanservice episode. Pretty funny too, when the tentacle monsters came in and basically assaulted Nanao and Isane…

    Saku-chan
    Reply

  31. I thought this ep was a little boring, but I still laughed at the coffin part and byakuya’s sand sculpture. For the rest of the ep, it seemed like they were too tired to try or that they simpy ran out of ideas to extend the omake into an episode: fanservice, Rangiku comparing boobs, fanservice w/ tentacle monster, and it’s pretty funny how they use Unohana as the explanation for all the randomness.

    yukino
    Reply

  36. @Chtome

    “Well this episode was good but does anyone know what the anime original stuff will be or no clue out there?”

    Yes, it will be something about some entity taking everyone’s Zanpakutou and materializes them. So basically we’re gonna see their true forms.

    damian
    Reply

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