I finally decided to shake off the stigma and just watch Naruto.
Overall, I do like it, as far as the main story and whatnot goes anyway, but there are some serious issues with the way the arcs and episodes are arranged.
There are some major issues related to the episodes needlessly wasting your time and filler in general.
1. You will watch a 3-5 minute scene at the end of nearly every episode that you will have to watch AGAIN at the beginning of the next episode.
I understand that back when this aired weekly, this was to recap the last events of last weeks episode, but when trying to binge the show on a streaming network, it's so painful. It wouldn't be so bad if it was like Dragonball where they spent 20-30 seconds recapping, but Naruto spends 3-5 minutes just about every time.
You could argue "Well, why don't you just fast-forward it?"
Firstly, because I have to watch it on Hulu (Hulu wont let me FF certain shows/seasons for some unknown reason) I don't often have that option. But even if I did, I still shouldn't have to FF through 7-8 minutes of every 15-19 minute episode (Because the intro's are all long too) to get to where I actually left off.
To make matters worse, there are certain episodes that will make you watch these scenes a THIRD time in the form of flashbacks. Not kidding. There are so many needless flashbacks in general, of scenes you've already seen, in this show that waste your time.
2. The show is riddled with backstories either about characters that aren't important enough to warrant them or are unnecessarily long.
The worst example I can remember of this was the backstory about Hinata and Neji. They gave these side-support characters THREE FULL EPISODES of filler backstory. Now, I can't say Neji is not important enough for some backstory, but come on, three episodes? 45 minutes straight? At least they've broken Rock Lee's backstories into bite size pieces for the most part.
3. Random Filler ... random, random filler.
Now, I love Bleach, but my biggest complaint about Bleach was all the useless filler sagas that took up 40-80 episodes. However, at least Bleach put nearly all of its filler into entire sagas you could just keep skipping through until you found where the main story is revisited. Naruto, on the other hand, just has random 1-3 episode arcs all over the place that contribute nothing to the over-arching story. Any new characters in these arcs are gone by the end of the arc and you learn nothing new about anything. They're just pointless. I think they were trying to go for a more episodic show, but it just feels bad when binge watching it.
In fact, the last 40ish episodes of Naruto's 220 episode run are such filler. That's right, the main plot of the story is discontinued by (Rough estimate) around episode 180 and is never revisited until the next series, Shippuden. Seriously, the "Sosuke Aizen" equivalent of the show does NOT get defeated by the end of the series, so don't wait for it... apparently he doesn't get defeated until way into Shippuden.
4. The milked suspense is often too much.
Fights sometimes just seem to drag on, because they try to build suspense in the worst ways at times.
(I know Dragon Ball Z is guilty of similar, but trust me, Naruto is worse about it).
Example: Naruto's enemy shoots a devastating attack or weapon towards him... the next 3 minutes are repetitive scenes building suspense and you're just sitting there waiting for the attack to reach him like "COME ON, JUST GET TO HIM, JUST DO THE THING AND GET ON WITH THE FIGHT FFS". I get that suspense is often necessary, but the way this show does it is not okay.
I'm not even joking when I say that you could remove the repeated scenes, cut 3/4 of the filler scenes, and cut each supporting character back-story down to 5-10 minutes and you'd likely end up with a series only 78 episodes long (Three standard anime season runs). In other words, this show wastes about 140 episodes-worth of your damn time. No exaggeration.
I'm not too far into Shippuden (Maybe 30 episodes), so I don't know if it will suffer from the filler issue, but so far it has stayed focused on the plot. It still makes you re-watch scenes and still gives unnecessarily long backstories, and the suspense is still annoying, but so far there hasn't been any pointless filler. At least it has that going for it... so far.
OTHER THAN ALL THAT BS (lol) it's a pretty good show. I do like it. I think Sasuke is a little bitch, my favorite character is Jaraiya, and I do think Orichimaru is a really great villain.
Overall, I do like it, as far as the main story and whatnot goes anyway, but there are some serious issues with the way the arcs and episodes are arranged.
There are some major issues related to the episodes needlessly wasting your time and filler in general.
1. You will watch a 3-5 minute scene at the end of nearly every episode that you will have to watch AGAIN at the beginning of the next episode.
I understand that back when this aired weekly, this was to recap the last events of last weeks episode, but when trying to binge the show on a streaming network, it's so painful. It wouldn't be so bad if it was like Dragonball where they spent 20-30 seconds recapping, but Naruto spends 3-5 minutes just about every time.
You could argue "Well, why don't you just fast-forward it?"
Firstly, because I have to watch it on Hulu (Hulu wont let me FF certain shows/seasons for some unknown reason) I don't often have that option. But even if I did, I still shouldn't have to FF through 7-8 minutes of every 15-19 minute episode (Because the intro's are all long too) to get to where I actually left off.
To make matters worse, there are certain episodes that will make you watch these scenes a THIRD time in the form of flashbacks. Not kidding. There are so many needless flashbacks in general, of scenes you've already seen, in this show that waste your time.
2. The show is riddled with backstories either about characters that aren't important enough to warrant them or are unnecessarily long.
The worst example I can remember of this was the backstory about Hinata and Neji. They gave these side-support characters THREE FULL EPISODES of filler backstory. Now, I can't say Neji is not important enough for some backstory, but come on, three episodes? 45 minutes straight? At least they've broken Rock Lee's backstories into bite size pieces for the most part.
3. Random Filler ... random, random filler.
Now, I love Bleach, but my biggest complaint about Bleach was all the useless filler sagas that took up 40-80 episodes. However, at least Bleach put nearly all of its filler into entire sagas you could just keep skipping through until you found where the main story is revisited. Naruto, on the other hand, just has random 1-3 episode arcs all over the place that contribute nothing to the over-arching story. Any new characters in these arcs are gone by the end of the arc and you learn nothing new about anything. They're just pointless. I think they were trying to go for a more episodic show, but it just feels bad when binge watching it.
In fact, the last 40ish episodes of Naruto's 220 episode run are such filler. That's right, the main plot of the story is discontinued by (Rough estimate) around episode 180 and is never revisited until the next series, Shippuden. Seriously, the "Sosuke Aizen" equivalent of the show does NOT get defeated by the end of the series, so don't wait for it... apparently he doesn't get defeated until way into Shippuden.
4. The milked suspense is often too much.
Fights sometimes just seem to drag on, because they try to build suspense in the worst ways at times.
(I know Dragon Ball Z is guilty of similar, but trust me, Naruto is worse about it).
Example: Naruto's enemy shoots a devastating attack or weapon towards him... the next 3 minutes are repetitive scenes building suspense and you're just sitting there waiting for the attack to reach him like "COME ON, JUST GET TO HIM, JUST DO THE THING AND GET ON WITH THE FIGHT FFS". I get that suspense is often necessary, but the way this show does it is not okay.
I'm not even joking when I say that you could remove the repeated scenes, cut 3/4 of the filler scenes, and cut each supporting character back-story down to 5-10 minutes and you'd likely end up with a series only 78 episodes long (Three standard anime season runs). In other words, this show wastes about 140 episodes-worth of your damn time. No exaggeration.
I'm not too far into Shippuden (Maybe 30 episodes), so I don't know if it will suffer from the filler issue, but so far it has stayed focused on the plot. It still makes you re-watch scenes and still gives unnecessarily long backstories, and the suspense is still annoying, but so far there hasn't been any pointless filler. At least it has that going for it... so far.
OTHER THAN ALL THAT BS (lol) it's a pretty good show. I do like it. I think Sasuke is a little bitch, my favorite character is Jaraiya, and I do think Orichimaru is a really great villain.
