Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War is back for its final arc. The first episode of Part 4, The Calamity, is a faithful if uneven adaptation of the manga’s endgame, built around a flashy new form for Yoruichi Shihouin and a solid, if visually inconsistent, fight between Uryu Ishida and Jugram Haschwalth.
This is the court to tell the end of the story.
It took some time to get to this point. Episode 1 spends its runtime setting pieces in motion rather than rushing towards a finish, which makes sense for a season with roughly 25 chapters of story left to get through.
TYBW first aired in October 2022, ending a wait of over a decade since the original Bleach anime ended. Cour Two followed in 2023, and Cour Three in 2024, and Part 4 now picks up the story right where that left off.
Yhwach’s Nightmare Begins: The Home Stretch
Ep 1 starts inside Yhwach’s mind. Older outfit, shikai and all. He’s dreaming Ichigo will cut him down before Kurosaki ever woke his fullbring. His take on it: “no better dream than a nightmare.”
It’s a scene pulled forward from later in the manga to open the cour instead, and the reordering does real work. The vignette-style visuals are enough to carry the unease. The Almighty is noticeably absent from the dream, and the music cuts out hard just when the scene needs it. A confident way to begin a season with so much at stake.
Then the episode does its housecleaning. Cour three sees the cast move to their stations, a bird’s-eye rundown of where everyone stands, including the beat where Ichigo tells Uryu that Haschwalth is his fight to finish. It’s a quiet handoff, but it sets the tone for everything that follows.
Ishida Uryu vs Jugram Haschwalth
That fight occupies most of the running time, and it’s where the ambition of the episode and its achievement begin to drift apart. Haschwalth leans on The Almighty, and the anime adds something the manga didn’t have: an afterimage effect as he dodges Uryu’s attacks, a small addition that tries to make his ability feel dangerous on screen instead of just stated.
But the animation doesn’t all hold up equally. There are some parts of the exchange that feel a bit sluggish, and the arrows look more obviously CG than they should for a season premiere. The fight is at its best when Uryu’s Heilig Pfeil are clean beams of light moving fast in a straight line, the moments where the show remembers what it’s capable of. Elsewhere it’s watchable but not the statement piece a final-cour opener probably needed. At one point, Uryu is stabbed in the chest with a sword. His glasses are unbreakable.
Yoruichi Shihouin Thunderous Black Cat Battle Princess
The other half of the episode is Askin Nakk Le Vaar fighting Yoruichi Shihouin, with Kisuke Urahara and Yushiro involved. This section is pretty faithful to the manga, gag included: the episode’s own title card hits right on Yoruichi in the middle of a fight, the kind of detail that only works if you’re already down for the source material’s sense of humor.
There is a re-explanation of the Special Threats, and a long conversation between Yoruichi and Askin that bogs things down before the punches start flying. The hand-to-hand exchange that follows is smooth and satisfying, even as the backgrounds behind it go noticeably out of focus for a while.
Then, Yoruichi reveals the form the episode is named after: Thunderous Black Cat Battle Princess. Her cat abilities are combined with Shunko and rely heavily on TYBW’s enhanced lighting for a barrage of lightning effects that are unlike anything the show has done so far. She loses more of her outfit doing it, ends up pressed against Urahara, and isn’t fully in control of her own movements pretty standard Yoruichi business at this point. What’s more important is that the hits connect cleanly, and the show mostly stays on impact, instead of cutting away from the damage.
