When Bleach got a rushed ending, millions of shounentards were crying in agony for not seeing all the damn bankais. When Toriko got a rushed ending, nobody gave a damn. Why is that when both of them are long running and follow a specific action/adventure formula that shounentards love so much? You can easily say explain it as Toriko never being as popular as Bleach, thus never having a big enough audience to care about it, but it still doesn’t explain why it wasn’t popular when both of them follow said successful formula.To the most part, it has to do with the adaptation of Toriko not being liked by the majority of the target demographic. The animators didn’t care much, it looked cheap, people lost interest very fast, and it was never promoted much in the west. Since adaptations are vital infomercials that affect the sales of the source material, it meant that Toei messed up its chance to make a goldmine, something which wasn’t a problem with the far better adaptation of Bleach.If we go deeper, we can find ever more reasons, one of which being how bizarre it felt. It’s about chasing weird looking animals, so you can eat them. Is it about adventure, or is it about cooking? And then some scheming villains appear and it became a fighting shonen with lots of joking around. Is it about action, or is it about comedy? You just never knew what the focus was in that show. Variety is good but when you mix so many genres, nothing sticks out at the end. The adventure fans were quickly bored with it because it didn’t have much of what they liked. They might as well be watching One Piece. Same with the cooking fans who would rather watch Food Wars, the action fans who would rather watch Dragon Ball Z, and the comedy fans who would rather watch Gintama. And since I mentioned all those titles, another issue is how derivative it felt right away. Everything about it screams of ideas found in other famous franchises. And I am not saying other shows are not doing that; after all Bleach was stealing concepts from Yuyu Hakusho, and Naruto from HxH. Toriko went overboard and was stealing too much from all over the place. The protagonist is essentially the second Jojo with Son Goku clothes, travelling in the world of One Piece. Even the very pilot episode is about him meeting the Straw-hat Pirates. This is not a standalone series, it’s crossover fan fiction. And yes, I know it was just a lame promotional trick, since it doesn’t exist in the manga, but what does it say about the credibility of a brand new show when it tries to get a piggyback by the most popular anime of all times? It sets the bar too high, it tells you it has no identity of its own, and on top of everything else, it’s not even well-animated. It’s even heavily censored. How do create an anime about constantly slaughtering animals without ever showing blood? This is not My Little Pony; it is a show where muscular dudes massacre huge monsters and then roast them and eat them. It should be raw, brutal and relentless; yet all you see is cartoony violence and grilled corpses look like candies.And it’s not like the writing was ever good, so it can at least make up for all its problems. There was never something smart or special about it, it was always playing out as another Fairy Tail, minus the fan service (which by the way is another show everybody would rather watch instead of Toriko). Not that the few fans of it would admit to that, since as you see from the comments I got from them, they are yapping about how amazing the plot it. The perspective of a Toriko fan is that it’s a great parody of fighting shounens and cooking series, about a guy who thinks hunting and cooking is a secured way to manliness. There is nothing funny about slaughtering rare animals. Nobody liked the concept and it’s something WWF would go ape shit about. Furthermore, there is nothing manly in cooking; the best cooks in the world are not muscular, they are fat and feminine. And that is why it was never popular, why nobody gives a shit of it ending prematurely, and why I was right when I was calling it shit from the very beginning.