The real issue with Naruto is an equal issue of too many characters, while at the same time making more and more and throwing them everywhere when they're incredibly boring. There's already so much going on and I could care less about anyone introduced in the timeskip, minus the villains and Killer Bee.

That's not an issue at all, it's a JUMP manga. A successful Shonen manga in JUMP always has that same formula. Loads of characters as back up for the main protagonist, character development up to wazoo, Strong hero but has this dark past or a cool secret. Something to do with a lost/dead family member.

The reason they start throwing random characters in certain arcs is based on character popularity.

Hunter X Hunter and Eyeshield21 had (has) LOADS of characters, some no one cared about but the manner of putting them in the story was done well. Bleach is more like a plot convenience.

fuck i read too much manga

I'm aware of massive casts, but Naruto seems to have this bug bad even more than other shonen fighting series. Seriously, I've lost count of the characters that have been introduced, but I can count the ones I give a crap about almost completely on one hand. A bunch of them seem too be there for this big political plot Kishimoto is trying to do, but it doesn't work because it doesn't match the feel of the series at all, plus most of these characters could be removed and chance pretty much nothing at all. That aren't cool or interesting, they just exist as a random cliche and seem to pop up just to move the plot when that job could easily be replaced. I think I would like Naruto way more right now if they went back to the roots of the first series, character focused and somewhat dark, but overall an uplifting series about a few great characters overcoming the odds. This massive political plot's message is heavy handed and just doesn't work.

It seems to me that in many Jump manga there is an access of characters with little wright. It's a combination of the two issues- Things like Geass and Baccano both have large casts, with each character effectively having some sort of back-story or weight to him/her. You would actually care when someone dies, and feel the weight of their death. In Naruto/Bleach, in the recent arcs, there was a cluster-fuck of characters introduces or initialized that you can just tell will stop being important/die by the end of the arc. It really keeps you from fully immersing oneself into the plot, without any character anchor. I feel (or rather don't feel) this more so in Naruto, because I personally don't give a fuck about him. He's like Simon from TTGL, without anything cool about him. In bleach, I actually like Ichigo, only because he's not a complete bitch and can have cool moments in which he pulls through and gets a new power, but it's so brutally predictable it hurts. I personally read it chapter after chapter waiting for the occasional cool scene. For instance, I've been waiting about a dozen chapters for the fight with Ichigo and Tsukishima. I dunno, I used to enjoy it more in the past, but now... I dunno. It seems like it's one Deus ex machina after another, until it's a clusterfuck of powers that really shouldn't be there.

Imo.

True but this is Jump we're talking about. Baccano is in a diff magazine, Geass is more of a seinen genre. This is the formula that works. And you know when the Manga hits a phenomenon stage they're just going to keep reusing the same formula over and over again...like Pokemon.

Anywho, lets stop bashing on the rights and wrongs of Manga writing and focus on Bleach.

Ichigo is a pretty cool character right now, and Tsukushima is a pretty badass villain. The way he's using Chad and Inoue like that is almost like Naruto's current arc and cool, I keep waiting for him to pull a UBER haxxor Aizen move on us with Urahara and his Ichigo's dad popping up at the most convenient time.