Reloading: Naruto (The Manga Series) Review

It’s been a few weeks since the end of the long-running Manga series, Naruto and I just realized I haven’t done a single post about it at all. I feel like I’ve let myself down a bit as Naruto was, at one point, probably my favorite anime/manga because I enjoyed the world, characters, lore, and fighting styles they created. All that said… how was the ending? Now that the series is over, does it all feel like a complete and well-crafted story or does it all fall apart?

That’s right… it’s review time! 

Before I get too far, let me just say it’s hard trying to figure out the best way to tackle a review of a decade long series that has fluctuated in quality and know where to really begin. So to save us all a lot of time, I’m going to make a very slap-dash synopsis scattered with links to pages with more details on the important events. Okay? Okay!

City of Ninjas has one annoying kid in orange possessed by a demon at birth (Naruto) and story follows his adventures with his team. This team consists of an abundantly useless female in all pink (Sakura), a kid with a LONG list of emotional and familial problems (Sasuke), and their sensei who looks cool and can do cool things but never is around long enough to actually show off just how good he probably is (Kakashi). You’re introduced to other ninja through a series of escalatingly larger events that expand the character roster, plot, and world of the series with each new story arc to a point where It’s no longer a City of Ninjas but a World of Ninjas.

At some point an evil snake-ninja coerces Sasuke to join him which becomes a critical moments in the lives of the main characters and sends Sasuke down a path of evil and darkness that ultimately makes him an antagonist and one of the final bosses of the series. We are also eventually introduced to an evil terrorist group that wants to take over the world… but actually doesn’t because it’s all a front to take over the world in a completely different way than initially proposed… which was all a lie made by one of the members at the behest of some godlike figure who… OH BOLLOCKS TO THIS! Evil guys to a bad and bad happens at infinitum.

But using main character powers (see Goku, Yugi, and really any Shonen anime) Naruto learns to control his literal inner demons, discovers his true ninja way, and uses his uncanny ability to charm people with his stubbornness and stupidity to stop various villains along the way and save his best friend/worst enemy/arch rival/ fan-shipped-love-interest Sasuke from throwing his life away by doing another bad that’s basically the same bad as the other evil-guys’ bads but it’s not as interesting as their bad. Okay, I’m done with this.

For those who have been reading the series, this review will actually cover the final story arc, the last chapters, and give my overall thoughts on how well the series ended. You guys obviously didn’t need a synopsis, but I figured I’d entertain the notion anyway.

The final plot concerns the events of the Great Ninja War. A story arc that has literally been in publication for the past two, almost three, years and has legitimately killed the pacing of the series. The previously stated villains (or at least the ones remaining) want to take the demon spirit from Naruto and use it in their plan to put the world into a dream world they control. So the various nations of the world decide to band together to fight against this all for the life of one ninja… actually there’s a second more interesting character they’re protecting too, but we don’t have time to talk about Killer Bee at the moment (look it up).

The war is fought between the Ninja Alliance (all the five major nations) and what remains of the villains (the Akatsuki) who have gained a necromancer-ninja that creates an army of the undead, bringing back old characters, flashback characters, and introducing new characters that clearly don’t matter in the big picture because they’re already dead and, by the series end, they’ll be back to dust again. The Akatsuki also have an army of plant-mutant-things that can mimic any other ninja, allowing them to sneak into enemy territory to gather information… or slit the throats of unsuspecting hero-characters.

One of the revived ninja brought back is named Madara Uchiha, which was confusing for the longest time because the main villain claimed to be Madara. As it turns out that masked idiot claiming to be Madara was actually Obito Uchiha, a character introduced in a previous flashback story arc that turned out to be the most underwhelming plot-twist in the entire series. But as it turns out, Madara was part of a long-running battle of reincarnated spirits of deified characters that have since reincarnated into the previous mentioned Naruto and Sasuke. Hold up, it gets more ridiculous.

These god-like figures also had a father who was apparently the original ninja that created all the basics of current ninjutsu in the world of Naruto. He is known as the Sage of Six Paths and, as luck would have it, it was actually his MOTHER of all things, that was actually pulling the strings of the original weird plant-mutant-ninja-guy introduced to us a while ago that never really seemed to do much. And her plan was basically the exact same as Madara’s. (Oh, Christ).

So then Sasuke finally rejoins Naruto as a potential good guy and they have one big epic showdown against the most generic and boring villain in the series thus far who is basically God, but evil. So perhaps she’s actually Satan? Whatever the case is, there’s no surprise that the heroes win and Satan loses. But before the series ends, Sasuke decides he still has to be a villain because of course he does. He then fights Naruto to the death but Naruto manages to convince him that his life is worth living, which changed Sasuke’s mind and they didn’t kill one another. Even though they were both kind of bleeding to death. 

This leads into a final chapter which is ANOTHER time skip to when all of the kids/teens of the series are now adults. Naruto is Hokage (head ninja of his village). Sakura and Sasuke got together and Sasuke is kind of just around. And you see other more interesting characters and where they ended up, but you don’t see too much to make the final chapter good because the story is about Naruto so it’s more about him and his kid. Thus, everyone lives happily ever after because the war only had maybe a handful of casualties despite involving literally EVERYONE.

And now you see why I didn’t want to do a full-series synopsis.

Taken on its own, this final story arc was absolutely terrible in a lot of ways. First, it highlights the biggest problem of the series in that it got WAY too big WAY too fast. This is a problem with a lot of franchises, but Naruto exploded almost immediately after the first story arc. The first story arc (The Zabuza Saga) was a simple one-off adventure where Naruto and company learn the value of teamwork and become closer friends because of the experience. It had a three act structure that worked and should have been the basis for the whole series.

But after that arc you had characters getting introduced by the truckload and the world expanded almost overnight. Plots became significantly more intricate with many more moving parts, but all of it was undermined by the fact that most of the characters were rather two-dimensional save for the few support characters that we rarely got to see. And what really brings it all down more is how slow everything tends to be on top of all that. Fights can last several episodes and the characters might not even be that interesting to watch. The whole entire Great Ninja War story arc was published over the course of YEARS and it KILLED the pacing of that series to a crawl (a slow crawl). It’s the opposite problem of Legend of Korra I keep harping on about. There they progress too fast and don’t slow down for character building moments. In Naruto, they slow down all the time to build off characters that will soon be irrelevant because they’re more than likely about to die or because they aren’t Naruto and Sasuke.

Another reason the final arc is bad is because you’re revealing a new villain as the real villain. First our villain was thought to be Pain, leader of the Akatsuki. But turns out it was Madara posing as Tobi. But then it turns out that the man claiming to be Madara was actually Obito working for the REALY Madara. All the while, a guy named Kabuto was planning on betraying Madara/Obito because he wanted revenge on Sasuke. None of that matters anyway because Madara was being used by an evil generic god woman named Kagura (was that the right spelling?) and her whole existence was the span of a handful of months. You need a fucking flowchart to keep track of who has the villain-ball next and gets to be the antagonist for six months of publication.

Of course, that all gets fucked when Sasuke steals the ball because the series has built that Naruto Vs Sasuke fight up for YEARS. And it’s a fight that, while I didn’t WANT to see it because I knew basically how it was going to end anyway, I knew it still HAD to happen. You can’t just build up the idea of a big epic fight between the two least interesting but also most important characters to a series and then just not do it. That’d be like telling everyone at your dinner party that we’re going to have vanilla ice cream for dessert and then springing it on them last minute that you changed your mind and everyone has to go home. You may not really care for vanilla ice cream but who’s going to turn down free ice cream?

What’s worse is the fight between Naruto Vs. Sasuke (round two… or five if you count the partial fights they’ve had prior to this) is that it isn’t visually interesting either. All of the cool “iconic” panels they do in the manga were done in their first BIG fight back when Sasuke first left the ninja village and it looked so much cooler then and the fight had much more weight to it. And seeing Naruto and Sasuke go their version of “Super Saiyan” in their last fight lacks the same thematic punch that it did when they merely mutated slightly in their first big fight.

Trying to gather all my thoughts on Naruto in a cohesive way is difficult because of just how scattered the series feels and how the central thread of the series just isn’t interesting enough to really get attached to at all. I don’t care about Naruto and Sasuke. I don’t care about Sakura. I sorta care about Kakashi, but he doesn’t do enough for that to matter. Instead it’s all the side characters that become increasingly more interesting as they grow and change and the stakes get raised. Why? Because we know their lives are on the line. If anyone is to die, it’ll be the expendable cast of nine hundred support characters and certainly none of the main cast used in the promotional art.

But if I had to sum up my thoughts on this, it’d be very much like a buffet. There are only certain dishes on the buffet I have any interesting in partaking. But the problem becomes the chefs don’t put those items out frequently enough and they’re usually only put out in small quantity. The reason for this is because the chefs are pushing their bigger signature dishes. And, for our scenario, their bigger dishes are very generic bland slabs of fish or low-grade steak. It’s not that the big dishes are bad, but they’re so bland and uninteresting that you don’t want the large portions they keep shoveling onto the buffet line.

That’s very much the case of Naruto. There are lots of great moments, fights, panels, and story ideas scattered throughout the series that ALMOST make the long stretches worth it. Shikamaru’s coming of age story when he fights two immortal monster-like ninja was probably one of my favorite moments. When Rock Lee, despite all of his efforts and his purely good spirit, was absolutely CRUSHED by a clearly evil character to a point where it looked like he would be physically unable to be a ninja again was emotional genius and well-executed. The Zabuza saga, again, was almost perfect, if not a little slow.

But for every good moment, you have stretches of time that make a fan of the series like myself question why I’m even bothering to read the next chapter. The Great Ninja War went on too long. The fight between the super Uchiha Bros (while visually interesting) was completely thrown under the bus with the plot twist that made the whole thing make almost no sense. Most anything with Orochimaru felt less interesting than it should have been. And the anime has to deal with MULTIPLE SEASONS OF FILLER! All of which is animated by a B-Team or even a C-Team, the plots are generally terrible, and the canonization of those filler arcs is suspect at best.

If you ACTUALLY love DragonBall Z or other typical Shonen-Style anime, then this show is likely the type of popcorn-anime you’re looking for to keep you distracted for a few hours. But if you’re looking for something with any real weight to it (much like Death Note or even Angel Beats) you’ll be disappointed. It’s art direction can be inconsistent. It’s narrative gets too big too fast and slows down at way too often to keep a consistent flow. There are many good merits Naruto can offer, but, at the end of the day it’s SEVEN HUNDRED manga chapters and over twenty consecutive seasons of anime to follow the plot of one of the least interesting characters surrounded by many more interesting characters that just don’t get enough to do.

And this is coming from a fan of Naruto who basically loved and enjoyed the series up until a certain point. And that point being right around the time when Kishimoto decided that they needed to go big or go home with a “World War” style arc that involved every person in the damn world, but still have minimal casualties and end it with another pointless rival battle. Was hoping for so much more out of this finale.

Sorry for the long rant on a manga series most of you probably stopped reading a long time ago. But I needed to fill the review slot and I have two game reviews coming up that aren’t quite ready yet (but close). Also, being a fan of this series, had to relay the disappointment with how the events concluded. If you did enjoy this review and want to see more like it, please be sure to like, comment, and subscribe. Next time, I’ll try tackling something that isn’t seven hundred chapters long and attempting to do it all at once.