Bleach – Volume 69 Review
Against The Judgement
The 69th volume of Bleach has hit British shelves and it’s full of build-up and returning characters! Let’s take a look.
The volume begins with the gathered members of the Gotei 13 as they try to create a gate to reach the Royal Realm and have a crack at the still- annoying-to-pronounce Yhwach (seriously, I’ve visited several threads on how to pronounce it all over the internet, and several completely different ways were put forward, all with valid reasons as to why they’re right…) Yhwach, by the way, absorbed the Soul King at the end of the last volume, thus for all intensive purposes has become God. He soon displays this power by building a Quincy town around the Royal Palace using his mind and the rubble around Soul Society. The Gotei 13 get some help from disgruntled Quincy soldiers who managed to survive their master’s attempted wiping out of his own forces and are more than a little upset about it.
We then switch over to Ichigo and his crew, where we get the now classic Kubo set-up of comedy interactions and several panels of explanation about how and where they are, all leading to the big end fight (for real this time…) These chapters include a few returning characters from both the Arrancar arc and the Lost Agent arc, but I won’t go into details in case you want to be surprised. Anyway, Ichigo and crew, as well as the Gotei 13, all arrive in the Quincy-fied Royal Realm and see a rather large and imposing castle pop up, and both decide to charge towards it and take their enemy’s bait.
That’s about it, apart from the last few chapters. They deal with the backstory of Yhwach’s right hand man Haschwalth and this volume’s cover boy Bazz B, one of the surviving lower-tier Quincy who has changed sides. It’s actually refreshing to see the backstory of these characters, it used to be a Kubo classic that most villains got flashbacks (normally right before they die…), which often really added to them and the overall story, but we’ve had none of that so far. It’s one of the reasons why the Quincy army is far less interesting than the Arrancar army, we simply don’t know or care about any of them (well, apart from Uryu…)
The artwork is of course still on form, though with the exception of the last chapters (give or take) this whole volume is setting up the final battle rather than having much action to convey… which is funny because I’m pretty sure I wrote the same thing last time… and possibly once before that even. Still, the final volume is 74, so even without future knowledge it’s not hard to see the writing on the wall, as this volume sets up the last battle for real this time. There are a few returns to the comedic art style Kubo does during the more silly talky scenes with Ichigo and co, so it’s not all people standing around in the middle of the book, talking.
It goes without saying that Bleach Volume 69 isn’t a good book to pick up if you’re not already following the series, but it is a good example of Kubo’s writing in amongst volumes that have displayed some of his worst. The use of comedic exchanges and black-paged flashback stories feels nostalgic after multiple volumes of neither, and a nice final return to the more familiar Kubo style before we dive head first into the grand finale.
