I watched some of it when I was younger but im wondering how I should enjoy the story, through manga or the anime?
I'm late to this thread lol but I'll also say the manga. There are multiple drawbacks to the anime, & I'll specifically highlight 3 of them:
1) Fillers (duh). Bleach anime is ~45% filler & you'll be constantly checking a filler list unless you actually want to watch them.
2) The anime got cancelled, and thus couldn't complete the story. The Thousand Year Blood War arc is hit-or-miss so certain people might not consider inclusion of the final arc an asset.
3) The anime does a poor job with exposition, cramming about 75 chapters of content in the human realm into the first 20 episodes. It's evident that Studio Pierrot wanted to rush to the rescue mission.
Of course the anime does hold some things over the manga, like the consistently good animation and my favorite OST in anime. I just don't think this outweighs the pitfalls.
YES.
Bleach is slandered like ain't nobody's business nowadays hahaha, but to be fair back in the day when Naruto and One Piece where at their peak, Bleach was part of that movement and, honestly, even though there are elements that are not that great, the series overall is pretty good.
For me, it starts very slow with the first arc but then when you reach Soul Society it's all uphill from there until the cast faces the main antagonist of the series.
It's worth the chance.
I have started watching bleach anime in late 2020 but then i felt the pace was pretty slow, so I started reading the manga in december and I recently finished the manga. I suggest you read the manga prior and then if you want to then watch anime. I can assure you that once you read, you'd definitely want to watch those scenes animated ( especially tybw arc)
Imo watch the anime while avoiding the filler, especially the early ones which imo were quite bad. The later fillers weren't nearly as bad but still subpar compared to main story.(though I'd still check out all the openings and endings 'cuz bleach had some amazing music)
After that you can decide if you wanna read the final arc of the manga or wait and see if they are gonna fix it in anime or not. Cuz well, it wasn't any good. If anything if you want to get the most of Bleach it's imo preferable to stop after the final fight with Aizen in season 14.
Also I might be biased to the anime considering it's the first "real" anime I choose to watch and only then picked up the manga after the anime ended in 2011.