yes, super late on this, but better late than never, right?

wow, well i watched an episode of the Bleach dub today, and man did it remind how much I prefer fansubs... The Japanese VAs.... just levels better, more fitting of the animation style, the behavior, the characters...

I think it was Episode 15. The one where Kon runs away and Rukia decides to leave. It's the first episode with Yorouichi and Renji (at the very end), plus the minor characters at the school have tons of lines, as almost all the scenes are typical conversations between classes.

some of the dubbed voices sounded alright. Ichigo's was fine, Ishida's was pretty good too. Kon's.... I'm willing to accept it, Raiden (that's forever who this guy is to me) is obviously trying hard at it, and he's pretty zany, not a bad match. The one line of Yoro's cat voice didn't sound awful, but not quite distinctive or gravely enough.

echo what Xan said about Lindsey as Urahara, not a good match at all.

watching this episode was real tough, because it's so dialogue driven, and the english VA cast for the side-characters was less than stellar. For the girls I kept on thinking, "They sound so much alike!" and that was weird, since the Japanese VA's I can't actually understand their speech!, but the Jap. voices are all so different and unique... But every time the girls spoke, it was like listening to the same VA trying to pitch a slightly different character... Orihime, Tatsuki and Rukia obviously stood out as exceptions to this... Keigo's voice sucked particularly hard.

but what ruined it for me was Rukia's voice. This episode was the one where I really decided I liked Bleach, because I could watch a whole episode and just care about the characters! I found all the little conversations and hintings/foreshadowing in this not-action packed episode to be really entertaining still! Rukia is at center stage in this episode, hers is the plot movement. The Japanese VA did an absolutely fabulous job putting emotion into this episode.

the english Rukia just sucked. The whole episode I just shook my head everytime she tried to intone something. Half the time she just had a dull, level tone of voice, and that was probably the best part! Cuz every time she made an attempt to convey any sort of feeling or emotion she failed miserably.

and I'm not just a dub hater... I do like dubs and think they have a really difficult task to do, and expecting them to surpass the original production, which was the element the show was originally forged in, is ludicrous. But I was pretty disappointed with my first impression of the Bleach dub.