Reviews Manga / Naruto

I dislike it when reviews saying "the only reason why this work is popular is because..." because doing so tends to be fairly narrow-minded and dismissive of people who actually like the work, saying that they don't have good reasons for liking it. It also seems as though many reviewers, at least on this site, associate Shonen with cliches and formulaic writing, to the point at which it's almost an insult.

Naruto actually took a while to get to All-Loving Hero status, since he started out wanting to become Hokage in order to get people to pay attention to him (Itachi nicely points out that you have to already be acknowledged to become Hokage, although that happens after Naruto has undergone Character Development and earned that acknowledgment), and it's only after meeting many people who have gone through hardship similar to or different from his that he starts developing more selfless reasons for wanting to be Hokage.

Sasuke has an interesting amount of development over time, and conflicting feelings about Naruto as a friend, a rival, and someone he relates to. It's by no means as simple as a standard rivalry.

There were quite a few fights after the Kage Summit Arc that required strategy, like when Naruto defeated the Third Raikage by hitting him with his own attack, Gaara defeated the Second Mizukage by understanding how his jutsu worked, and Kinkaku and Ginkaku were defeated by having their own ninja tools used against them.

I'll concede that the anime has problems with pacing and filler, but the same can be said for Bleach and One Piece. The problem's largely with them being long-running series, and that an episode that's more than 20 minutes long covers more ground than a chapter that's at most 20 pages long. As for the filler, you don't need to watch it, although its presence means you have to wait longer for new episodes.

Overall, this review mainly parroted criticisms of the show without providing evidence(particularly the parts about broken aesops and poor treatment of female characters), and thus was not very informative for readers.

As Kidd Radd (webcomic) had well pointed out, 1 episode of anime a week, 20 minutes long, shows 2 chapters of manga (2 weeks long), reading time 5 minutes each. So it is twice as time-consuming, is released twice as often, and always overtakes manga, and also has fillers, which don't bring anything useful or meaningful to the plot.

But when you mention "you don't need to watch it" you're mostly wrong, because if someone's watching anime, he'll hardly ever also read manga in parallel just to know where the fillers are. So, you don't need to watch fillers, yes. Because you also don't need to watch anime at all. But if you don't want to watch fillers, but want to watch the anime, then you must watch anime, AND keep check on manga, AND keep check on new episodes regularly, just to say "Nope, it's still filler". Which is also time-consuming, and might not save any time over just watching fillers every week for about a year's length.

Alright Valiona, now that you have a point in criticizing my reviews, now mention what could I have done better for my own review and what is your opinion of Naruto. Is it a Magnum Opus of Shonen or is it an average one for you?

There are graduations of taste between those two poles. And even if he finds it average, it doesn't necessarily follow that he agrees with your assessment that it has no artistic value to make it worth watching/reading.

I agree with Spectral Time that it's not entirely accurate to define things by asking "Is it So Cool It's Awesome or So Okay, It's Average?". Following your rating system, I, while hesitant to give number ratings in my reviews, give Naruto a 9 out of 10. It's not perfect, but I found it highly enjoyable from beginning to end, more so than many other shonen series. It also wasn't the first shonen manga I read; Death Note was first.

XenosHg, as far as I know most, most people I've heard from watch the anime while also reading the manga, or at the very least, don't say that they've never read the manga.