As always I am a huge fan of Bleach. I loved the original anime and after it ended I made sure to read the manga to see how the story ends. Now we get to see it finally animated and get to enjoy the third cour of the Thousand Year Blood War. Cour three does a great job balancing both story progression and provides some amazing fights and I can’t wait to get into it.

The story in this cour focuses on a lot of different characters as the soul reapers continue their fight against the quinces. The fights themselves are unbelievable and we got to see some major moments I’ve wanted to see animated for some time. One of which was the bankai of Captain Kyoraku. I was excited for this moment as soon as it was revealed in the trailer and to see it played out was astonishing. This also leads to something I loved that is exclusive to the anime. In the manga there are a lot of moments that are so sudden they almost feel like they come out of nowhere including one with Kyoraku’s lieutenant Nanao. When these moments happen in the anime we get a lot more story to go with them. Flashbacks of these character’s lives that fully explain what is happening in the present. Seeing these moments with the extra content completely eliminated the random feel that I got from reading the manga and was a huge improvement to the story as a whole.

Speaking of improvements we can’t talk about this cour without mentioning Uryu. In the manga Uryu’s moments are few and far between but he was a major character in this cour. Having fights that never existed in the manga including one with Renji where both of them showed new anime exclusive powers. Taking the time to explore Uryu’s motivations and how he balances them adds so much to the story. Where he and Ichigo are close friends but torn apart due to this battle it makes sense to take more time to explore that dynamic and we really got to see that play out beautifully here.

The anime really adds so much to these already amazing moments mainly in the form of extra explanation and content. In doing so the flow of the story as a whole greatly improves from the manga counterpart. There are moments I actually want to talk about more but I’m being delicate to avoid spoilers.

The fight scenes also look amazing. The animation is nothing short of spectacular and we get a lot of fighting to go with the story content. Fights like Kyoraku versus Lille Barro, Uryu versus Renji and so many more were visual marvels. Plus this cour really balances out the time spent with the high action fighting and scaling that back to take time to tell the story as well.

So overall the anime is doing an incredible job adding content to fix the few flaws I had with the manga. Moments that felt like they came out of nowhere come with a substantial amount of context to rid the story of that feeling entirely. The show also presents new content to further flesh out the lore of the world of Bleach to create a story that manages to greatly improve on what we already know. In many ways we get so much new content it’s like experiencing the Thousand Year Blood War for the first time all over again and that alone is something to celebrate.