Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War E03: VOLLSTÄNDIG (Also, Extra Uryu Scenes)

Bleach, Thousand-Year Blood War Arc, Episode 3: March of the Starcross

Huh, extra new scenes! I guess we're not going to do multi-episode reviews just yet. 

Again, I have read through the manga so none of these are particularly surprising for me. This anime is just... a pretty well-executed adaptation, y'know? 

Anyway, this episode goes through a relatively large chunk of the Quilge Opie fight in the manga. We get a very cool sequence as Ichigo blasts through a bunch of Sternritter goons (who uses bows) before Quilge himself summons his own weapon -- a saber with wacky extensions from its hilt that makes it into essentially a projectile-launching weapon but it's still shaped like a saber. Basically the writer just really wanted to draw a bunch of wacky weapons and not bows all the time. 

Ichigo keeps comparing Quilge's Quincy powers to that of Uryu, and it's pretty interesting that Ichigo describes Quilge's Heilig Pfeil as being weaker than Uryu's, something that Quilge notes is unlikely after recognizing the name. These hints of the Ishida family being connected with the Wandenreich was dropped all throughout the manga, but never really got a proper explanation up until the rushed ending, and... there are definitely moments in this episode, in the form of actual extended scenes for Uryu, that's definitely gotten me excited for more Uryu stuff. I'm going to save most of the Uryu stuff for the end of this review, though it's neat that this one non-sequitur between Quilge and Ichigo's probably going to be built up some. 

The action scene between Ichigo and Quilge is, again, very snappy! Ichigo and Quilge have a bit of a back-and-forth before Quilge gets the order to finish off Ichigo. He activates Letzt Stil... or rather, a perfected version of it, the Vollständig. I completely forgot the connection between the Letzt Stil and the Vollständig, or that Soken clung to the traditional ways while the Quincies of the Wandenreich are constantly innovating. Also... Quilge Opie is 100% far more entertaining in the anime. The voice they selected for this pompous, monologuing bastard is just perfect, and his epic proclamation of the Qunicy Vollständig (or rather, kuiiinshiiii foooooru-shuuuteen-riiiiiihh-hiii) makes this whole scene pretty damn epic. 

There's also a very cool shot of Quilge being so fast that he appears behind Ichigo. Also epic is Quilge taking a full-blown blow from Ichigo's big-ass sword and not budging an inch. And Quilge's boasts about how shinigami and hollows finding their righteous executioners' forms creepy is appropriate is so, so much better with voice-acting. My opinion on Quilge has mellowed out over the years, but I did dismiss him as kind of a one-note villain the first time I read him in the manga. Didn't help that I also read most of the Wandenreich arc weekly, and Bleach isn't a good manga to read weekly with how slow some of the pacing can be chapter-by-chapter. 

And then SURPRISE GIANT CHIMERA MONSTER as Ayon sucker-punches Quilge with a fist as large as Quilge is tall. We do cut away to some other scenes at this point, but when we return back to Hueco Mundo, Ayon is basically doing to Quigle what the Hulk did to Loki in the Avengers, bashing him so hard into the ground while Apacci gloats about how badass their weird left-arm chimera monster is. 

The beating takes place as Apacci explains to Ichigo and companyb about what Ayon is... but, of course, despite being pounded face-first into the ground like a slapstick anime character, turns out that Quilge isn't dead yet. He stabs Apacci in the midst of her gloating, before activating Sklaverei some more, absorbing Reishi from everything around him, even living creatures, and also dismantles Orihime's Santen Kesshun shield. There's a particularly well-done scene of him snapping his broken neck back into place. Ouch. 

Ichigo swoops in and shattered Quilge's pinwheel halo-hat as Ichigo goes Bankai and Getsuga Tenshou's him. Very cool split-second flashes here as Ichigo and Quilge clash! 

Also, while all of this is going on, Urahara and Pesche had gone off to carry Dondochakka. I... kinda forgot Urahara was supposed to be with them, but I guess we can't have the Captain hang out while Quilge is showing off his powers, yeah? I get the narrative reason -- no one cares about the Dondochakka rescue mission, and you can't have Urahara curb-stomp the cool new villain powers. It's just a terrible tactical decision, is all, to have your strongest character go off on a solo rescue mission when probably Chad and Orihime are more suited to it. 

And, again, unlike the manga, we keep cutting back and forth between the action in Hueco Mundo with scenes in the Gotei 13, but I'm going to keep a lot of the Gotei 13 scenes clustered separately in these reviews. There's a pretty great scene of Yamamoto being absolutely pissed off as he demands the entire Gotei 13 prepare for war. We also get a great scene between Yamamoto and Mayuri. We kind of gloss over the fact that Mayuri massacred an entire village of the Rukongai to correct the balance of souls... I've always loved that this is a solution done by Mayuri that's definitely evil, but necessary to protect the damn universe and preventing it from collapsing... but the Rukongai mystery did admittedly drag on a bit long and cutting out some of the extraneous dialogue there to speed up the opening act is understandable. I really love how Yamamoto snaps at Mayuri for not detecting the threat sooner, but Mayuri just refuses to take any shit from Yamamoto and condemns him for not heeding his warnings about Quincies surviving earlier. 

...not that anyone could really do anything against the Wandenreich's invasion, but I really do like the shot of guilt-ridden Yamamoto a lot. This is a man who just lost his best friend Sasakibe, who realizes that part of the blame lies in him. Whether it's him not listening to Mayuri, being unable to kill off Yhwach... or even the fact that his kind decision of not bothering with the Ishida clan might be a blind spot that caused all this. 

We also keep cutting away to Ryunosuke and Shino (and IIRC in the manga this is the last we hear of them), the two new Shinigami, who discuss about why the Quincies and Shinigami are at war. This kind of doubles as both a recap and an explanation of the information available to the Shinigami... though I really do like that. Sixth-seat Kajoumaru show up and give them a whole exposition, including a very cool speech about how if both sides are just, then it will lead to war, noting that the Quincies, well, have a very good reason to hate the Shinigami. 

After all this speech is over, of course, the damn gate they are guarding explodes in a big-ass pillar of blue flame! Yhwach watches from above as his Sternritter arrive, and we get the arrival of Bazz-B. His Burner Finger attacks are actually animated and clues in the audience to his fire powers a bit earlier, and he blows a whole goddamn hole through Izuru Kira's chest. Bye, Kira, you're (sorta) the next casualty in this invasion! 

It's a small thing, but I've also always liked the story name-dropping these random seated officers and having them call out their Shikais before Bazz-B murders them all. It makes the world feel a bit more alive, and that these wanton murders of random lower-ranked Shinigami mean a bit more. Of course, the way this is done in the anime has Kira and his three officers stand around the giant pillar, waiting for a support Shinigami to read his iPad and call out that it's a Quincy... and nowhere at that point do they release their Zanpakuto in anticipation of a fight. Really, Kira, you kinda bought this on yourself. 

Anyway, we get brief shots of many other Sternritter as Haschwalth gives an epic speech about purging the Shinigami, and that's the huge cliffhanger of this episode. 

And then let's talk about the scenes added here! In the manga, Uryu practically disappears from the story after noting that he won't come with Ichigo to Hueco Mundo. Spoilers for the manga -- but he appears later as part of the Wandenreich with zero explanation, and later betrays the Wandenreich... again, without much explanation. The readers assumed that this would be, well, expanded upon later on in the story as we go along, but since Bleach got rushed to the end, nothing really materialized about it. Since this is a second take on the story, though, we get to see Uryu's character arc a bit more organically!

(Also, Kajoumaru's speech about war vs. self-defense and justice overlays Uryu's scene, which both makes the speech more poignant, and makes the episode a lot less slow since we cut away to a more important character in the midst of a scene that would otherwise be exposition done by background characters.)

Uryu is going around rooting for information about the Quincies, since... how could the Quincies be alive? After all, the Ishida clan are supposed to be the last Quincies. Ryuken, of course, is completely unhelpful, denying Uryu any sort of useful information. Uryu later reads between the lines and manages to root around in Ryuken's office, finding an old, tattered journal belonging to his grandfather Soken. He finds out a lot of information about Yhwach and the Wandenreich, including the fate of his mother (which the readers actually get to know)... and Ryuken is still dismissive of him. Again, it's interesting to tie this in to later revelations we'll get in the story. Again, this is just a pretty short scene and it's not something particularly revolutionary (it's not like the entirety of the Can't Fear Your Own World novel is happening in the background or something, though I'd like to see that) but I do look forward to see how these scenes will explain and actually show Uryu's character arc throughout the arc all about the Quincies. 

Pretty packed and pretty cool episode! Obviously the Ichigo-vs-Quilge fight is pretty cool, yeah, but I'm also a big fan of the Sternritter arriving in Soul Society -- always one of my favourite parts of Bleach as we find out more powers and names of our new enemies. But, of course, the promise of a proper character arc for Uryu really does make me pretty happy!

Random Notes:

• A chunk of the Quilge encounter that got removed from the manga is Cyan Sung-Sun creating a dome with her Anaconda power called 'Muda', before it got consumed by Sklaverei. I particularly remember this because it's a named enemy ability! 
• Sklaverei is a very logical evolution of a Quincy's established powers to absorb and mould Reishi into energy bow and arrow constructs. And it does seem like a pretty damn powerful ability, right? To just vacuum-suck every Reishi construct around you? Except despite how it's presented here, Sklaverei never gets used ever again throughout the Thousand-Year Blood War arc, so I'm going to have to assume that it's just an ability unique to Quilge's Jail powers.
• A pretty fun line from Yamamoto's declaration of war is him noting that there's no reason to believe that the enemy will adhere to their supposed 'seven day' schedule. 
• There's a neat bit of continuity attention -- which is also in the manga -- of Ichigo noting that Urahara told him about the Quincy's Letzt Stil. After all, Ichigo wasn't around for when Uryu activated Letzt Stil against Mayuri during the Soul Society arc. Also, no one in Team Ichigo knows what the hell Ayon is since they aren't around when Ayon was formed during the Fake Karakura Town arc. 
• Biskiel is written with the kanji for "Justice of God" in the original manga. It's one of the handful of Vollständig that actually got named. 
• When we cut to all the Vice-Captains reacting to the arrival of the Sternritter, Shuhei is in... the editorial room. Really? All these other Gotei 13 members are running around preparing the lesser troops, and you're in the editorial room? Shuhei, you suck.