Naruto, I’ll always love you. I’m not ashamed to admit it. Much in the same way Dragonball Z will forever have a place in the disposable-fun-loving part of my heart, you do, and will, too. With that in mind, let’s go back a few volumes from the current scanslated efforts and consider the events leading up to the time skip, reviewing Viz’s uber speedy release/catch-up of volumes 25 – 27.
These three volumes can be summarised by The Big One, its aftermath and Kakashi. Naruto and Sasuke finally have the ruck that’s been dreamt of, almost-happened and suggested into oblivion since the last, slightly less satisfying fight from days of yore. As the manga makes explicit, there’s no Sakura to limply stand between them and no Kakashi to put an abrupt stop to the proceedings. Just one arrogant ladyboy with superpower affections and one tunnel-visioned idiot with a naive grasp on human emotion. And the fight is one of the least creative Kishimoto has ever produced. The setting is utterly fantastic; the drama is as tense and emotional as it should be . . . but ultimately it’s just an abbreviated (compared to DBZ) power-up battle between two of the manga’s protagonists. No one is going to die; I knew this even when I first read it. The fight is purely a representation of the two forking paths of Sasuke and Naruto, and so lacks all the tactical excitement and enjoyable twists of standard Naruto battles. They pull out their respective signature moves, clash a couple of times with lots of dramatic camera angles underwater etc. and that’s about it.
It’s difficult to truly criticise, however. You flick through it all in a twenty-minute sitting and have decent sense of accomplishment by the end, and most importantly it serves its purpose perfectly. The real meat of the trio comes from the latter two-thirds of volume 27, specifically Kakashi Gaiden, or Kakashi Chronicles as Viz slightly over-states in its translation. This collection of chapters represents the end of Kishimoto’s previous style by being a concentrated homage to it; everything about early Naruto is here and carried out with pitch-perfect brilliance, and all in Kishimoto’s ‘new’ art style (which I still can’t get over how much I love). Not only do we get unadulterated Kakashi, whose amiability was solely lacking in his younger years (though being no less the badass), but we also receive first-hand experience of the Fourth Hokage, learn more about Konoha’s history and get preliminary Uchiha insight. For a series of chapters that was meant simply to bridge the gap Kakashi Gaiden/Chronicles is one of the biggest highlights of the whole series. Be that due to Kakashi’s bottomless charm or Kishimoto’s perfection of his chosen formula, I don’t know, but it kind of sucks we never get the same experience again after its conclusion.
Right around this time in any of my old skool Naruto reviews I write the obligatory lament paragraph explaining how the tardy official English release reminds us of how good Naruto once was. But that’s rubbish; bar a few housekeeping volumes in Part II Naruto has always been a compulsive, enjoyable read. Its focus just shifted from Harry Potter-like school shenanigans to the traditional Destroy The Evil Organisation Bent on Social Destruction. And these three volumes officially herald this change in direction (made official by Part II’s subsequent two and a half year time skip).
Granted, the latter incarnation has proved to be nowhere near as charming or inventive as the first, but Naruto has an undeniable sense of identity and, dare I say, uniqueness that pulls it above being a trope-ridden, by the numbers drudge. Both those elements are painfully apparent in the newer Naruto chapters; I’m not going to argue against the claims that the manga has lost a lot of the personality that made it stand out so much in the beginning and turned into a drawn-out franchise. But when has Jump manga ever been about artistic integrity? In that anthology series are chosen and syndicated based solely on their franchise potential — how much merchandise it can spawn and how well it will translate into an anime. Naruto’s dramatic change in intention is simply the act of a long-running manga realising it’s time to step-up and actively pursue the world domination ambitions it had from the very start. Sacrifices have to be made, I guess.
But still, I may well rarely feel the sense of attachment or love I once did for these characters, but never have I been bored by reading Naruto. I just wonder how the hell Viz are going to package Part II. If they add a bloody Z to the title then I will officially boycott them for life.
