Bleach Vol. 7 Review

            Ichigo and his friends have all managed to enter the headquarters of the Soul Reapers. Getting in was the easy part though as upon entry, they accidently get split into four groups. In one corner, Ichigo and Ranji are stuck together. In another corner its Orihime and Oryu and finally Chad and Yoruichi are stuck be themselves. To make things worse, all of them have been targeted by the now alerted Soul Reapers.  

Good and the Bad

            In these four episodes, the group is split up and the audience gets to see something entirely different. While most of these characters we’ve already seen fight before, Ganju as the new addition to the team creates some automatic interest from the audience to see what he can really do. Better than this however is the fact that the team has been split up into entirely new teams. This is really the first time in general that we’ve seen Orihime really step in and truly fight beyond a few defensive moves.

            Ichigo has the biggest fight of the volume when he faces off against another Soul Reaper. The fight scenes in this volume are much more graphic than they have been over the last few episodes. The staff really didn’t show a ton of graphic blood. The blood was shown but the artwork changed to maximize the story line aspect of the defeats rather than the blood with many of the more violent scenes being changed to black and white manga style artwork. Just a really simple touch that emphasizes the plot device.

Music

             Episode 26 is the first to have the second opening theme and animation as well as the third ending theme and animation. The new opening theme is titled ‘D-technolife’ and is a ballad with a bit of a rock edge to it. In the new ending theme, another soft ballad titled ‘Houkiboshi’ is placed in. This theme plays over an interesting background animation featuring all or most of the Soul Reapers that are going to be showing up over the next few episodes.

Dub vs. Sub

            Joining the cast on this volume were quite a few new voices for the party’s opponents. Perhaps the most surprising addition to the cast is Vic Mignogna as Ichigo’s opponent on this volume, Ikaku. Vic turns in a very gritty performance on this volume and you can really feel the lust for battle in the voice that Vic gives out.

Extras

            Production art and clean animations.

Overall

            The characters are in a brand new situation and the audience is getting to see brand new reactions from them. Now the audience is seeing what the characters would do in a brand new life threatening situation while we work our way towards the next big opponent. The action on this volume is strong but to be honest, I’m much more interested in seeing what is going to happen on the next volume with Uryo and Orihime. In other words, I enjoyed this volume but I didn’t feel like I gained a lot of ground in terms of the story.