At the very beginning I found Naruto a bit slow to start and was wondering why people why were hyping it up so much, but when I got to the end of the Land of Waves arc (Haku & Zabuza) I finally understood why people loved it and stuck with it.
From there the series managed to keep the momentum going – Part I is a solid romp and still remains a classic manga. Unfortunately Part II is where things started to go slowly downhill. Then it reached the War arc and things just went into freefall from there. It’s not as though there weren’t good things to come out of Part II (Hashirama/Madara flashback arc is really good, imo), but Kishimoto relied far too much on the input of his editors, resulting in an inconsistent story which kept shifting gears. The ending was really unsatisfactory to me, save for Naruto and Sasuke’s final battle (if Kishimoto had screwed that up, even the most die-hard fan would be hard-pressed to forgive him).
And the less said about the Last, the better. But that ended up killing any and all enthusiasm I had left for the franchise.
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