Naruto

So finally, after 220 episodes the series is finished. Well, not quite – but the first part of it is done at least. The next installment of the series goes under the name Naruto: Shippuuden

Naruto is the story of a young, loudmouthed orphan boy/ninja who dreams of becoming the next leader of their village. Of course this is easier said than done considering his natural irresponsibility.

The first part of the story starts out with his “trials” as someone ostracized by the village. Sealed within him, is a powerful demon which ravaged the land. The village leader (called “Hokage”) at the time sacrificed his life to seal the demon while Naruto was still a babe. Naturally, the villagers have always felt awkward when dealing with him. And he persists on proving his worth to everyone.

It would be impossible to go into detail of the other sub-plots, but suffice to say that along the series, this stigma was eventually erased and became a non-issue. Instead, the series’ main conflict was eventually replaced with the issue of Naruto (and friends) having a falling out with his best friend [and greatest rival] Sasuke, who joined the ranks of the uber bad guy Orochimaru to increase the former’s powers.

This is where the series basically halted and continued spitting out worthless filler episodes. I guess there are a handful of interesting episodes afterwards, but all in all, they’re all a bunch of fillers right till the end.

The end of the series shows Naruto having to leave the village to train with his master. This serves as a perfect segue to the new series Shippuuden – where a couple of years have passed and everyone has grown up a bit. Shippuuden, judging from the very first scene of the first episode, seems like one giant flashback which culminates to them finally catching up with Sasuke, but of course, Shippuuden is a topic for another discussion altogther.

I guess there’s nothing else/more to say about this series. It’s extremely enjoyable for the parts that actually follow the important story-line(s). I haven’t read the manga, so I don’t know at which point(s) it digressed from the “story”, but I would be inclined to say that it was fun watching it right up to the point where they lost Sasuke. After which, they started putting filler episodes – and everything went downhill from there.

If I could give a suggestion, I’d say once you get to the point where you think there are a bit too much fillers (for as long as Sasuke is gone), you can already just skip to the last few episodes – chances are you wouldn’t be missing anything if you did.

But just to be clear, filler episodes aside, Naruto has an really good story-line – so I’d recommend it to anyone.