Review of Boruto: Naruto Next Generations
To put it simply, whether or not you will enjoy this show will depend on what made you enjoy Naruto. As a stand-alone Shonen this anime is okay. It has fights that are decent, and fights that are good in terms of animation and composition, and its plot is consistent. There’s always a narrative development to look forward to as the show progresses. But as a successor to the 720 episode icon that was Naruto, it falls short. Boruto abandons much of the complex character development and backstories made the franchise unique. Most side characters are thrown at you without any strongbackground to hold on to. It’s hard to emphasize with any of their motives since they don’t exactly have any other than just being there to push the plot forward. Just the chunin exam arc of the original Naruto humanizes its side cast in a way Boruto never has. Episodes that just revolved around the Konoha 12 were just as entertaining as the episodes focusing on Naruto himself because we knew who these people were and why they mattered. Even though these problems have more to do with the manga and its relationship with the anime it still really drags down the story.
The villains suffer from a similar problem, their motives are mediocre at best and non-existent at worse. The Otsutsuki’s existnce as these overpowered aliens who seek nothing but the destruction of the planet are a far cry from the previous antagonists, who always had a level of complexity that revolved around the relationship they had with their powers and past. It honestly feels like I’m watching a loop where some two dimensional supervillain constantly spams a limited set of abilites coupled with taijutsu until eventually the main character comes up with a basic ‘gotcha’ move to end the battle after it’s dragged on for long enough. These villains and their abilities progressively get more ridiculous and simplistic at the same time, eventually the power system of Chakra effectively ceases to exist. Which segways into my main point.
Ninjutsu is destroyed, if you ever cared about wind style, lighting style, taijustu, genjustu, sealing, fatigue, strategy etc etc; just forget about it, it’s all gone. It was never going to be good considering the mess that the end of Shippuden made out of power scaling but it’s really just all over the place in Boruto. It tries to significantly scale down the original cast at multiple points with mediocre explanations behind doing so as an excuse for academy level students to defeat god level opponents. The majority of fights have much less to do with tactics and being a Shinobi, and more to do with who can throw more flashy stuff at the other Dragon Ball style.
The show really lost it when a power that can change the entire world in an instant could be activated without chakra, by a character introduced mere episodes ago with zero prior backstory and a shallow motives.
The list is long but you get the point. Putting it all together, it feels like I’m watching a show made for 10 year olds with occasional moments of violence. With an unlikeable MC who doesn’t face any real consequences, 2 dimensional characters, a sidelined original cast and world building that has been stripped down to flashy fights and low quality taijustu. This isn’t the story of a kid fighting to be acknowledged by his village, or a teenager who wants to end hatred and war, it’s a story about a nepo baby who gets to become more important than his father simply by being there.
But at the end of the day, Maybe none of that matters to you. You just want to see you favorite characters and their kids fight in some cool battles while wearing headbands. And that’s okay, don’t let anyone tell you what you can and can’t enjoy. But for the rest of us, this anime is simply not an acceptable sequel. At best it’s just your average cash grab profiting off of the original.