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Naruto Reread

Ray Down

Banned
What did I ever do to you? :(

Nothing, just want to see you suffer :p

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We still get some gruesome moments with Gaara, but yeah, after a certain point, it stops being as gory. Which in this case legitimately takes away from the story, because in this case, the gore really helped sell how utterly brutal the ninja world was outside of Konoha. It really made it feel like if a character made a wrong step, they'd be insta-glibbed by the various jutsu that characters had at their disposal. It's not something that the series should have done away with, as if we need to add yet another thing to that particular pile.
The gore came back in full for the Obito flashback when he finally snaps, it really really helped that story.
 

Wamb0wneD

Member
We still get some gruesome moments with Gaara, but yeah, after a certain point, it stops being as gory. Which in this case legitimately takes away from the story, because in this case, the gore really helped sell how utterly brutal the ninja world was outside of Konoha. It really made it feel like if a character made a wrong step, they'd be insta-glibbed by the various jutsu that characters had at their disposal. It's not something that the series should have done away with, as if we need to add yet another thing to that particular pile.

Yeah the severeness of being outside the village was kinda gone after a while. Also as you already said I really liked the aesthetic they went with during that time. And even though it was foggy a lot of times i liked Amegakure conceptually.

The fact they had no Ninjas and all the political stuff they went through was more interesteing than any other locale in this manga. I guess the fact that Kishimoto actually did something with it with Pain later on helps and was one of the better moments/backstories in the post timeskip arcs.

Too bad every other Land in the Naruto world is barely fleshed out.
I guess the worst thing post timeskip is how he treated everyone but Naruto/Sasuke. Lee who?

Come on guys the great ninja war was fantastic! Even the first introduction of the main villain and all of his fights until the end were great!

Cobra Commander Kabuto unveiling Madara motherfucking Uchiha was some bad ass shit, Madara was bad ass, but the villains after that were lame.

The Clamshell Dude was cool and had one of the more interesting Jutus (because lets be honest most are bland af and
Madara
was neat as well... But the rest sucked.


The gore came back in full for the
Obito
flashback when he finally snaps, it really really helped that story.

I uhh..don't think he has read that far yet.. Spoilers?
 

phaze

Member
Yep, he went from being a jerk with good reasons to be like that to a psychopath to a parent who left his family behind...

You're right, he's not edgy at all.

That's quite a strawman.

I think a lot of it was due to the unplanned story- it felt a lot like he was making stuff up as he went along the longer the series went on. It seemed like he didn't think far enough ahead, so there are a lot of weird things in the story that aren't properly resolved or seemingly come out of nowhere.

It's funny but to me, Kishi started planning stuff out only with the onset of Part 2 where he sets up Tobi, Kamui, the statue, Madara, Mokton as a power to subdue Bijuu for a resolution 300-400 chapters later. Kurama/Naruto not being the only one such duo too. Of course, a lot of it flew somewhat against the Part 1 since he didn't thought of it before and tried to shove it on top of it and clearly, he didn't manage to plan (or stick to the plan) everything but there was a good much more of it than in Part 1 which strikes me as being almost entirely winged with Sasuke stuff being maybe one of the few things that needed some foreplanning.
 

Pein

Banned
Heheheh...No.

In fact the all of uchiha clan, with the exception of maybe Itachi, are a bunch of drama queens.

I feel for the OP. As soon as I finished the manga, and I only did it so I could have a closure on the clusterfuck that is Naruto, I put all that thing behind my back. I don't care about Boruto or whatever the fillers they come up next only to keep milking this dead cow. Kishimoto can't write drama and his female leads have some serious issues.

Seriously Kishimoto doesn't seem to understand women at all and he sucks in character design.

Go reread Hunter X Hunter OP, much better quality and better use of your time or skip Shippuden all together.

He sucks in character design? people have a lot of complaints about Naruto but you never hear shit about his art and character designs. Who do you think is badly designed?
 
Land of the Waves arc feels so fucking tonally dissonant from the ENTIRE rest of the series after that point that you'd think it actually was a completely different series. A story, at it's core, about assassins and a world of assassins and killers for hire being about the inevitable folly that you need children to facilitate these things by growing them into the art but the contrast of brutality and viciousness against their innocence.

The pure violence and death of each scene and fight meant something, because these were assassins, the fights aren't "because I'm strongest" or "for my friends" its "we each have our job to do, one of us will die".

Then it's just... dragonball with "ninjas".

Early Naruto really was a huge bait and switch, as the entire rest of the series all but abandons these concepts. Hell after a point they even stop using shuriken and kunai as anything other than fucking swords.
 

LotusHD

Banned
Land of the Waves arc feels so fucking tonally dissonant from the ENTIRE rest of the series after that point that you'd think it actually was a completely different series. A story, at it's core, about assassins and a world of assassins and killers for hire being about the inevitable folly that you need children to facilitate these things by growing them into the art but the contrast of brutality and viciousness against their innocence.

The pure violence and death of each scene and fight meant something, because these were assassins, the fights aren't "because I'm strongest" or "for my friends" its "we each have our job to do, one of us will die".

Then it's just... dragonball with "ninjas".

Yup, the power creep was real. And it's so silly too, because the powers they already had were formidable enough, then it just crazier and crazier... (Also inadvertently made me aware very early on that Tenten would be completely useless.

Also fuck all that crazy ocular jutsu nonsense outside of Itachi's Tsukuyomi
 
Yup, the power creep was real. And it's so silly too, because the powers they already had were formidable enough, then it just crazier and crazier... (Also inadvertently made me aware very early on that Tenten would be completely useless.

Also fuck all that crazy ocular jutsu nonsense outside of Itachi's Tsukuyomi

Tenten was obviously useless before the creep set in hardcore anyway, Kishi doesn't even give her more than, what, a full chapter spread for her Chunin exam fight?

If you ain't got a ancestor power, you ain't shit.
 

LotusHD

Banned
Tenten was obviously useless before the creep set in hardcore anyway, Kishi doesn't even give her more than, what, a full chapter spread for her Chunin exam fight?

If you ain't got a ancestor power, you ain't shit.

True, but at least you could argue back then that Tenten just got incredibly unlucky with a very bad matchup. Then all the crazy stuff happens, and it becomes clear a kunai ain't touching another person anytime soon. That said, I did enjoy it at least getting used for stuff like Minato's techniques, or when Sasuke fought Orochimaru during the exams.

As for the ancestor power, well, it's more accurate to say that if you're not a part of a clan, then you ain't shit. But even then, Rock Lee won us all over...

Sakura and Tenten on the other hand... Well, to be fair, Sakura got her moments, but it did suck that you couldn't expect anything flashy from her.
 

caliph95

Member
The power creep is one of the things that fucks shonen or at least Bleach and Naruto where the initial levels were crazy to begin with but then it just get ridiculous and villains get so powerful in both of them that bullshit is needed to beat them. Or it forces it to be a fight between power "chakra" "spiritual" levels than strategy half the time.

It also doesn't help besides Samurai's who don't do anything we don't see other kind of fighters besides ninjas that are worth a damn and everybody is a ninja
 

LotusHD

Banned
The power creep is one of the things that fucks shonen or at least Bleach and Naruto where the initial levels were crazy to begin with but then it just get ridiculous and villains get so powerful in both of them that bullshit is needed to beat them. Or it forces it to be a fight between power "chakra" "spiritual" levels than strategy half the time.

It also doesn't help besides Samurai's who don't do anything we don't see other kind of fighters besides ninjas that are worth a damn and everybody is a ninja

Speaking of which, the thought of chakra reserves became amusingly pointless at times. Like virtually no one has the amount of chakra that say Naruto has, but they can fight just as long as he can lol, because after all, wouldn't be very exciting if someone actually ran out of chakra for once.
 

caliph95

Member
True, but at least you could argue back then that Tenten just got incredibly unlucky with a very bad matchup. Then all the crazy stuff happens, and it becomes clear a kunai ain't touching another person anytime soon. That said, I did enjoy it at least getting used for stuff like Minato's techniques, or when Sasuke fought Orochimaru during the exams.

As for the ancestor power, well, it's more accurate to say that if you're not a part of a clan, then you ain't shit. But even then, Rock Lee won us all over...

Sakura and Tenten on the other hand... Well, to be fair, Sakura got her moments, but it did suck that you couldn't expect anything flashy from her.
Techniques besides mountain destroying jutsus stopped meaning a damn thing when they became supermen and the whole hard work was diluted when Naruto became a reincarnation and top people were top because of bloodlines
Speaking of which, the thought of chakra reserves became amusingly pointless at times. Like virtually no one has the amount of chakra that say Naruto has, but they can fight just as long as he can lol, because after all, wouldn't be very exciting if someone actually ran out of chakra for once.
Remember when Kakahsi had to be careful with his Sharingan since it drains his chakra

Also they stopped meaning shit when in order to beat deidara and Kishi realized Sasuke had no chance and was stated to have no left he in split second spanned jutsus that should require more chakra than he has in order to escape
 

LotusHD

Banned
Basically the only hard rule w/ chakra reserves imo was that if you aren't Naruto, you can only make like 2-4 Shadow Clones tops.
 

caliph95

Member
I don't remember much about Madara. I just heard that he was so OP that Kishimoto ended up having to defeat him by creating another character who is basically a god, but has the dumbest weakness imaginable so the protagonists could win.
I should stop ranting and reapeating myself but another thing with power creeps

In Bleach the final boss not only was powerful and had a high power level Kubo for some reason also gave him the most broken of abilities even more so than Aizen. He even got eye magic that lets him see the future and bascially change futures to where he wins and can counter any ability he knows. He even beat the most powerful soul reaper (becuase he was stupid enough to explain how his powers work) even though he was written out of existance by countering it. Only way to beat him and because Jump got sick
of it was for Uryu and Ichigo dads to pull an arrow out of their asses in the last minute

In Fairy Tail which hasn't ended yet but one of the Characters that was beaten was Zeref, who was probably the most powerful mage and was only beaten by Acnologia who is bascially a super dragon in existence and was hyped to shit since the beginning of anime was bascialy screwing with the main chacater. Then he got a huge power up and became a god and
lost because Natsu punched him hard enough with flames of savage emotions or in order words combination of nakama and being angry

Power creeps is shit
 
It's the Hiashi's master plan meme (heavy on late spoilers)

The best thing to ever come out of Naruto, in fact.

Okay that's pretty cool.
Heheheh...No.

In fact the all of uchiha clan, with the exception of maybe Itachi, are a bunch of drama queens.

I feel for the OP. As soon as I finished the manga, and I only did it so I could have a closure on the clusterfuck that is Naruto, I put all that thing behind my back. I don't care about Boruto or whatever the fillers they come up next only to keep milking this dead cow. Kishimoto can't write drama and his female leads have some serious issues.

Seriously Kishimoto doesn't seem to understand women at all and he sucks in character design.

Go reread Hunter X Hunter OP, much better quality and better use of your time or skip Shippuden all together.

Joke? He absolutely did live up to his hype. They threw everything they could think of at him and he kept going. My man summoned TWO METEORS within the first hour of his appearance. Totally agree with you on female characters though, he writes like someone who doesn't actually talk to females for more than a couple minutes in his real life. I disagree when it comes to drama. He can write good drama. Neji & Hinata, the sanin, Haku & Zabuza, Rock Lee. He can do it, but often the character motivations end up getting a bit muddled. You have to look closely to see their motivations and you recognize that they're actually tragic or sympathetic characters. Madara's thing was "hey its fucked up that we have child soldiers."

He suffered a lot of loss and his plan to get rid of it was still better than just "well maybe one day people will stop fighting". His desire for power didn't stem from "I just wanna fuck shit up." I like HXH but the character motivations aren't strong from what I remember. Gon wants to find his Dad, Killua wants to be strong, Kurapika wants revenge, phantom troupe just wants to do whatever it wants to do, Hisoka wants to get his nut by fighting people--their motivations aren't really that strong or say anything about society or even the context of the story itself. Someone like Madara is a direct deconstruction of the whole idea of the fact that you're cheering on 12-15 year olds who should be out enjoying their childhood, but are hyped about learning how to take lives. It says something about you as the viewer being okay with the concept of what are essentially child soldiers who aren't even sure WHY they want to be ninjas or what it means to be a ninja.

Techniques besides mountain destroying jutsus stopped meaning a damn thing when they became supermen and the whole hard work was diluted when Naruto became a reincarnation and top people were top because of bloodlines

Remember when Kakahsi had to be careful with his Sharingan since it drains his chakra

Also they stopped meaning shit when in order to beat deidara and Kishi realized Sasuke had no chance and was stated to have no left he in split second spanned jutsus that should require more chakra than he has in order to escape

The tone of the story absolutely did shift, can't disagree with that. It felt like after a certain point, the author was just rushing to get the thing finished by giving powerups at the last second. It was a disaster, and it betrayed the whole idea of ninjas being silent, effective killers. Naruto is a comedic character precisely because he's the opposite of what we as a viewer think of when we think of a ninja. He doesn't blend in, he's loud and flashy in his clothing and his expressions, and we're supposed to laugh and move on--but then it gets to this weird place where we're supposed to look at a guy summoning a huge statue that is the size of a mountain and treat it with complete seriousness.
 
Anybody stating that Killua "just wants to be strong" isn't paying attention. He wants to travel with Gon and while doing so wants to find his purpose in life, which he eventually finds but he ain't going to protect her while being weak.
 
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