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Naruto ~Review~

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AonE Naruto 141 E856897C02924201 09 05 Naruto ~Review~

Rating: 6.7/10

A bit more than a year ago, I wrote a post making a promise to watch the Naruto with an open mind. As you all must probably already know, I’m a bit of a procrastinator, but I finally have seen the original series and am here to finally review it!

To put it simply, Naruto is…an average series. It has some positive aspects, but there’s also a lot worth complaining about. Before I start to go more into details, I just want to get it out there that I pretty much skipped all the 80 filler episodes from hell. I tried to get through at least a few episodes, but it was unbearably bad. There isn’t much to say about them besides the fact that they are unwatchable, so rather than boring you throughout this review by complaining, I’m going to instead ignore those episodes and focus on the parts that were adapted from the manga.

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This is the story about a kid with a demon sealed within him who wants to become the best Ninja ever. It’s as generic as it gets, but I know to never expect too much out of the shounen genre. What I expect from the genre is mostly a lot of action and progressively more exaggerated powerups. Maybe I’m being unfair, but that’s what it’s ultimately all about with those other shows like Bleach, D. GrayMan, Fairy Tale, and whatever else. So what makes Naruto so popular? I think there are several reasons, but if I had to pick one I’d say because of the giant cast of dynamic characters. I’ll get more into that soon…

One thing worth mentioning about Naruto is this Chakra business. Much like most shounen that I know, there are variations of powers similar to Chakra. I’m referring to all those other shows that have things like Devil Fruit, Innocence, Nen, and some other stuff I’m sure. As you’ve probably already noticed, I don’t have much I can compare against since I don’t watch much shounen, but I do have a good idea about how Nen works in Hunter x Hunter. When you contrast the two, you can immediately notice the simplicity of Chakra. It’s just an excuse to add a new dimension to the story so that people can use special moves. There’s not much else to it, and so I didn’t really enjoy this aspect of the series since it just felt boring, especially in training episodes.

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Another fault in this series is its pacing. In the case of a fight, even if it’s about a side character it will usually only take an episode to get through it. This is expected and it worked because it stayed interesting and didn’t have enough time to get repetitive. The problem lies more with the main characters, and not even when they were fighting, on one occasion when Naruto and his friends were trying to chase someone down, it took them at least five episodes to get anywhere. It was legitimately five episodes of Naruto just jumping through a blur of trees! Who could have thought that was a good idea? I’m guessing it was the same person who thought making 40 percent of the series just filler seemed logical.

So to take a break from all the negative, I do have some positive things to say in regards to the cast, which for its size had a good number of enjoyable characters. I think the best part about Naruto is its supporting cast, who seem to only grow more and more on you as the series goes on. Even within the main cast, I felt Naruto eventually almost grows on you. The only times that I was truly annoyed by the characters were with Sakura and Sasuke. Sakura just feels consistently one dimensional while Sasuke was cold to the point of being annoying.

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Luckily there were characters like Kakashi and the other older characters, as well as the villains which all really managed to shine. Orochimaru, for example, was as entertaining as he was engaging, especially in moments like when he didn’t care to become a young girl if it meant escaping old age. I also ended up really liking Gaara, who went through a compelling character change as the series progressed. In fact, he was one of my favourite characters in the series! I had no idea he was going to be presented as a foil to Naruto, and the way the story used hat to develop both the characters was surprisingly good.

In a way, you can pretty much view these 220 episodes as just a way to set up for Shippuden. The way the story leads up is only to setup for the later events. The ending is pretty unsatisfying, but it managed to sell me enough that I’ve already started watching Shippuden. In all, this was a series that was fun to watch. When you learn to accept some of its fault and start getting into the rhythm of it, you can’t help but get absorbed in the high energy of the series. The low rating has to do with the fact that despite some good things, there are a lot of problems and I can’t completely forgive the fact that a large portion of it is unwatchable. Nonetheless, this was a series that did surprise me and it is somethign worth watching if you enjoy other shounen series or are looking for a good place to start.


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