Saturday, October 21, 2006 @ 12:04 am
Bleach & Naruto.
Even though i'm working normal hours this week, i feel like i'm more tired than when i'm working night shifts. Maybe because i don't have ample sleep. Quite contradictory since i complain about not enough sleep in previous entries. Well at least i'm not working for the next four days so i can catch up with "zhou gong" haha.
Company gonna have D&D next month but the thing is the theme is back to school. Man i only have my chung cheng PE t-shirt and shorts. And the funny thing is i still have the metal buttons. Who still have chung cheng uniform? Hope some kind soul would loan it to me. ^_^
Glad that some like my recommendation on Saiunkoku Monogatari. Just want to share all those books/manga/anime that are great and worth reading/watching. The following anime/manga may already be very popular but i'll just do a short review.
Gonna recommend Bleach and Naruto, 2 of the most popular anime/manga now. Both are shounen so it's action-packed but they both involve many emotional aspects of the characters. Here's summary of Bleach, followed by Naruto and then the review.
Kurosaki Ichigo, 15, is a high school student with the ability to see spirits and talk to them. One day, a female shinigami(death god/soul reaper), Kuchiki Rukia, appears in his room in search of hollows(bad spirits) which will attack humans and pulses(good spirits) to devour their soul. Her duty is to exterminate hollows and send pulses to Soul Society. Ichigo didn't first believe in such a thing as shinigamis as he had never encounter them before and normally humans can't see shinigamis unless they have high reiatsu(spiritual power). However his family was attacked by a hollow and Rukia got injured while trying to save him. The only option left was to let Ichigo become a shinigami by piercing Rukia's zanpakuto(sword shinigamis use to slay hollows, its size indicate how much reiatsu the shinigami has) into his heart and giving him Rukia's power. Rukia lost her powers and Ichigo becomes a substitute shinigami for her till Rukia regains her power.
Twelve years ago at Hidden Leaf Village, there was an attack by kyuubi(nine-tailed fox demon). Many people were killed and it was until the leader, the Fourth Hokage, sealed the kyuubi inside a newborn baby by sacrificing his own life. The baby is Uzumaki Naruto. The Fourth Hokage was looked upon as a hero and his wish was that Naruto to be respected in a similar light by being the containment vessel for the kyuubi. However the village people avoided him like he is the kyuubi itself. The Third Hokage made it a rule within the village that other villagers were forbidden from mentioning this event to anyone, even their own children, however because of the way their parents treated Naruto, they mistreated him as well. So Naruto grew up as a lonesome orphan, without friends, family, or acknowledgement of any sort. Nobody would pay any attention to him, so he sought attention in the only way he knew how, through pranks and mischief. However it soon changed when he used Kage Bunshin no Jutsu(Multiple Shadow Clone Technique) to save his sensei Umino Iruka's life. That incident made Naruto realise that Kyuubi was contained inside him and there was someone who cared about him, and understood how he felt.
The review only includes the anime up to the point before the fillers(episodes which the story doesn't appear in manga). Bleach and Naruto have the humour, action and storyline to attract its fans. But i feel the draw comes from what the author creates. In Bleach, the highlight would be the zanpakutos as each of them has a name, changes the shape in different releases and different abilities. For Naruto, it would be the different ninja techniques. As for duels, i feel that certain battles drag too long in Naruto, example Orochimaru against the Third Hokage. And Naruto have a tendancy to show the flashback of characters when they're battling. I don't mean it's bad but compared to Bleach, the characters in Naruto are less mysterious so in a way less appeal though there's a lot of character development. The storyline in Bleach caught me off guard due to a plot twist while it's pretty linear in Naruto, not much surprises. On the other hand, Naruto seems more real as there're character deaths while Bleach doesn't seem to have much even for the bad guys. Graphic-wise, Bleach is more detailed. Overall each of them have their plus points which is why there're so many fans. ^_^
