Real talk here.. I will never get bored watching the Benizakura arc....It's so well tight and brilliant written, with both equal great comedy and drama moments...Where all the characters who are involved, are playing all important roles to the plot, expecially Schinpachi, with his big heart and braveness, who truly shines here and Kagura, who is not behaving too dump or childish as usual, while remaining strong, but also vulnerable as as the kid she truly is...
Where Zura is both logical and goofy here, without being a clown and where Gintoki is not overpowered or too sadist, while he is allowed to be emotional as a young person, whose childhood friend has disappeared or even murdered, and his newfound family is in great danger...A scene, I truly love in this arc is when Katsura and Gintoki, are staying behind to cut down the Harusame, while Elisabeth is taking the children away to safety, to prevent them to get involved in more violence...They are too young to see their adopted father slicing down his enemies, causing a true blood bath, before their own not so pure anymore eyes...I also love how the Shinsegumi are not involved to this...They still have not developed such a strong relationship with the main trio, to be part of this so personal story and I strongly believe, this is why this arc remains so great and never gets old... Because in my opinion, Sorachi during this arc was more free to write his story to his own terms, before the growing popularity of some specific characters, put so much pressor to him to change so many of his stories later, to involved more scenes with them, while sadly living some great characters to the very corner...
This is why, so many of the following arcs had not such a strong impact as this one...A bright example of this overgrowing popularity, can be showed to the film and live action remake of this arc, where the Schinsegumi trio are also involved...!
As much I love the Schinsegumi, I have to admit, that in some arcs I actually found their involvement to be suffocating and pointless to Gintoki's struggles with his past...There is a good reason Sorachi put them out of his story for a while, during the Rakouyo arc, to let finally his story a moment to breath, before he finally returned them back....Here there is for me, the true reason why he didn't involved their characters more during the last arc, leaving the very last characterisation of his, to the joui trio, plus Schinpachi ( whose character in many occasions was left out in my opinion, to include Okita's , whose character was more loved from of the audience to be paired with Kagura's instead of him).
My final point is, that the true reason why this arc, will always remains to the top, despite all the worse dangers and compelling characters the later arcs had introduced, was the true freedom of the creator to write the story of his own terms and not the ones his readers/watchers wanted... A fact , that can be spotted to all the media as a whole, were the early serious plot points feel more special, than the later ones, where the story has gained enough popularity to change the course to the audience preferences and not the creator's original point of view...A great a piece of storytelling of his time, noone is gonna meet sadly soon ...
