Overview:
Mayuri receives a call from Urahara, who had stayed behind in Hueco Mundo to search for a way to reclaim everyone’s stolen Bankai; Urahara claims to be able to come up with a solution based on the data gained from his earlier battle with Quilge.
Our Take:
So… this episode was great and honestly, Bleach might be my favorite Shonen after finally watching it all. But one thing that Shonen anime does that absolutely annoys me and the only way I can describe it is “power creep”. Especially because sometimes it doesn’t even make sense. Everyone got their Bankai back now but turns out the Quincy had a bigger more powerful move up their sleeve the whole time. So, my issue is two-fold, why did they even bother stealing the Bankai if they had something that was better? Also, it’s just annoying when one side gets the upper hand only for it to amount to nothing only moments later.
That is a problem with the Shonen genre as a whole though not just Bleach. Other than that this episode was absolute fire as the kids say. With it being ten years since the last season of Bleach it makes sense that there would be some recasts. Shinji was one of these, formerly voiced by Roger Craig Smith and now voiced by Aleks Le. This episode might as well have been titled “Shinji kicks major ass” and Aleks was a huge part of that. Some of these Bankai have ridiculously hard-to-pronounce names and Aleks nailed this one.