Bleach is a series that is in a very awkward position in the manga community. It used to hold a large amount of prestige and popularity as one of the pillars of shounen manga, along with Naruto and One Piece. Naruto has since ended and One Piece is still going strong, with Bleach now finished as well. While sales of it in its later years were still quite good for a manga in general, it was a far cry from its original sales and it routinely tanked in the ratings in Shounen Jump until its conclusion.

The premise of Bleach is quite similar to Yu Yu Hakusho, to the point where I've heard the pitch for it was rejected by WSJ initially for that exact reason, and kubo had retool to it to make it more original. A kid who is unusually spiritually aware gets thrust into a whirlwind series of events thanks to a mess-up by a shinigami, a spirit who helps govern affairs in the afterlife. The series starts off as an episodic monster-of-the-week-esque affair, where Ichigo and Rukia solve various problems. particularly the extermination of Hollows, creatures created from the souls of humans who are consumed by anguish. Eventually the series begins having a more traditional battle shounen structure with defined arcs, beginning with Soul Society.

Soul Society is widely considered the high point of the series; it upped the stakes, introduced us to the larger Bleach mythology, and presented a decent narrative for the main character.

Up until this point, I would say that Bleach was a decent but not great series. It wasn't really anything more than a standard battle shounen, but this wasn't really a problem because the overall writing was competent; the manga knew that in order for the action to have weight you had to have a solid emotional backbone, so it gave us enough information and focus on the characters to make us invested in the manga. It wasn't breaking any new ground with shounen storytelling but was good at doing what it was trying to do, and had at least a couple of interesting things going on like a main character who wasn't a copy of Goku from Dragon Ball, and a mexican-american supporting character.

This was also helped by the fact that Kubo, whatever other problems he may have, is legitimately a talented illustrator, who can come up with numerous unique designs for characters on a weekly basis and keep them consistent, which is an impressive feat in and of itself. His art also demonstrably changed and improved throughout the series, going from a rough style where most people were square-jawed to a graceful and more delicate style with some cool brushwork in the later chapters. Reportedly Kubo actually doesn't use reference much, if at all, so the fact that he can rotate all these different characters in his head and just draw them is a sign of strong draftsmanship on his part.

However, upon peaking with soul society, Bleach has only really gone downhill. The next arc started off at relatively the same level of quality, but gradually devolved into a horrific slog that took YEARS to resolve and failed to give a satisfying payoff, to the point a lot of people stopped caring. It was at that point that Bleach took its nosedive in popularity and quit being a super popular manga.

The main issue with Bleach overall, and something that actually began in Soul Society, is that the cast of the series is horrendously bloated. It is common for shounen series to have excessively large casts, but I think Bleach is probably the worst manga I've read in the number of superfluous characters who are completely forgettable and have no good reason to exist. Tite Kubo has admitted that when he runs into writer's block he usually solves it by creating like a dozen new characters, and it shows. Instead of working with the cast he already has and giving a few select ones get the lion's share of development and screentime over several years, Kubo just creates more and more of them and just shuffles them around giving focus to everyone equally.

This creates two problems. Firstly, a lot of the characters end up being very shallow because Kubo can't afford to give that much depth and focus to all of them. Some characters start off important and interesting, like Chad and Kon, but ultimately are sidelined because Kubo seemingly doesn't know what to do with them. Some of the characters you even forget exist really, like Ichigo's school friends who barely appear in the series anymore.

Secondly, it creates extremely bad pacing often because the manga devotes a number of chapters to fights between minor characters which we know don't matter in the grand scheme of things and which we know very little about to begin with, and which thusly we have no investment in.

As if this wasn't enough there is just some plain bad writing in terms of how some of the character arcs are resolved and how certain characters end up defeating opponents. Orihime's character arc seems to be building up to something important in the Arrancar arc but eventually has no meaningful payoff, and the last time she gets any real focus in it it just ends up being a horrible note to leave her on that makes the reader feel as if she's regressed in her development. Ichigo's fight against Ulquiorra feels like a complete copout that only receives a somewhat adequate explanation in a completely different arc, which still does nothing to dampen how much of an anti-climactic asspull it really felt like. Elite enemies that have been built up for hundreds of chapters are defeated by bit players and other characters besides the people who were supposed to be the main characters (and unlike HunterxHunter where this happened and felt subversive and interesting, here it was boring and unsatisfying).

The Fullbringer and Thousand Year Blood War Arcs are in my opinion actually an improvement compared to the Arrancar arc in multiple ways, the former because it brought back the focus to the people who were supposed to be main characters, and the latter for tying the series together somewhat cohesively and answering a lot of hanging questions that have been around for years.

However, for the small amount of good it did, it has culminated in what is by all accounts a pretty lackluster finale that feels like it was meant to close off the series in a hurry because god knows why it lasted this long. To say that it was anticlimactic and unsatisfying would be a big understatement. I hear this is because Kubo was pressured to end the series by Jump management. I don't know if this is true or not, but if it is, it certainly explains a lot. It's a reflection of one of Bleach's worst problems, editorial decisions that led to extremely lackluster storytelling and a bunch of unsatisfied fans.

Bleach was actually the first manga I ever read online. I was very young and impressionable, and at the time considered it amazing and gripping. However I eventually stopped reading it due to laziness, and by the time I would have liked to pick it back up, my tastes and preferences had changed a lot as I had grown up and been exposed to more media, and most people seemed to agree that it had jumped the shark, so I was content to just leave it unfinished.

Upon getting caught up with it on a whim, and now finishing it, I would say that the manga is honestly probably not worth picking up for new readers, the main reason I continue to read it myself is mostly out of curiosity. It started off on a relatively high note, and then just drifted into mediocrity with a really terrible ending. There are much better manga even within its own genre, and when compared to some of the really impressive output in the manga industry, even Bleach at its peak was just ok.