Naruto Review

For its first forty volumes this is a model of the form. The villages are mercenary states that take contracts and compete for work, so the politics have an actual mechanism, and the early opponents are shaped by that economy rather than by escalation. The Chunin Exams are a masterclass in juggling a large cast, and Zabuza's death, Rock Lee's fight and the Pain invasion are among the best sequences the magazine has printed. Kishimoto's real gift is antagonists, since Pain, Itachi and Obito each arrive with a position on the cycle of violence that the hero cannot easily refute.

The Fourth War undoes it. A technique that resurrects the dead removes consequence from a story built on consequence, the villain stack keeps being replaced by a larger one behind it, and the closing volumes retcon the mythology into a lineage that nobody asked for. The pairings that end the series feel administered rather than earned. Reader scores sit well below its fame for structural reasons that are easy to name, and the early volumes remain genuinely excellent.