The thing about Gintama is that even though it was originally a manga, the fast pacing and zany humor makes it work so much better as an anime. Gintama isn’t meant to be serious. It’s more along the lines of a gag-manga; it’s basically a series of fillers, with a couple of story arcs thrown in for character development. The great thing about Gintama is that it knows how to poke fun at itself, along with (of course), its great parodies and obscure references to otaku-culture. It’s not like Naruto or Bleach, where you sit down and devour 200 chapters in one sitting. It’s something that you pick up when there are no new chapters of One Piece and stop whenever you feel like. That is why there is seems to be little character development; if there was character development and a plot, people would get lost about where the story was. In my opinion, Gintama is more like an insane slice-of-life manga. where the extraordinary happens to be a daily occurrence.

PS: It’s not as if Gintoki is a completely useless human being who happens to be a fighting demon. The manga-ka has given him (and the other characters)philosophical wisdom which he spouts at appropriately manly moments. Although on the surface Gintama is quite shallow, if you read deeper, there’s a lot of meaning in the characters’ words….or maybe it’s just really shallow.

In fact what could be the main premise of the series – The Samurai and Amanto conflict seem to be relegated to background filler in later chapters. Even what could have been a important person in the Ultra nationalist resistance against the Amanto, Katsura never even got himself a serious arc.

What people seem to be interested in Gintama are the Dragonball spoofs, its brilliant Deathnote and Gundam parodies and the way it mercilessly pokes at the Otaku culture. Not to mention that most of the characters sound like they came out of a Manzai act on speed and you have a winner in the eyes of most Japanese viewers.