You can really feel how close the party has grown to one another, whereas Naruto's Team 7 felt extremely forced, not to mention how they each have everyone's skills are important to the party's survival.
Yeah, that was always a problem with the manga starting from the end of part one one. Part Two put the Team 7 dynamic on a pedestal, but frankly it was overdone to the point of absurdity. As mentioned earlier, not only was the team only a thing for a couple months at best, they never even got along. Like, ever. That's part of the reason the "bonds" thing never worked for me. Naruto and Sasuke were never shown to be anything but rivals, seemingly bitter ones at that, right up until the plot needed them to have been blood brothers, basically. It came out of nowhere. And things with Sakura weren't much better. Naruto's relationship with her didn't start becoming an actual friendship until the tail end of the teams time together, when she realized he wasn't a creep but a genuinely good kid who actually liked her, while Sasuke treated her as nothing more than an annoyance he barely gave a damn about. Team 7 kind of sucked, if you look at it frankly, and while some romanticization makes sense on the part of the characters - we as humans romanticize the past a fair bit - it frequently got into the territory of absurdity.
Like, you can't show one dynamic for three hundred chapters then tell us it's another. Maybe we'll go with it if we like the work enough otherwise, but deep down we know. In hindsight it probably should have been a clue about how he handles personal relationships and prepared us for how NaruSaku got flipped.
He probably thought it would be a series of great twists if he switched out the primary antagonists, but in doing so he progressively undermines their threat and how they work doesn't add up
It also made a total mess of the direction of the series. I bring up when Orochimaru got punked a fair bit, but man, it's really a striking example. The manga clearly had no idea what it was doing anymore past that point and even felt like it was stalling for time. Remember Sasukes new team that formed right in the aftermath, the one we followed for months, if I remember correctly? Man, I do. They sure amounted to a lot of nothing. Also, wow, Akatsuki just ended up being a joke. They couldn't enter a single combat without a member dying. It felt like if they went to the store for milk they'd lose somebody. Then the manga's like "uuuuh, Tobi's an Uchiha, yeah, Madara's a thing, the antagonist is an Uchiha!" and I'm just like "think I'm done here".
HIs romantic subplot was also problematic (obviously), because he was so focused on the twists (and making Sasuke as big a scumbag he could) he hurt the outcome.
It's another "stunted growth" scenario, too. Like, it turns out Sakura really never matured at all in that regard. Neither pairing had any real development. Both men turned out to be terrible husbands and fathers. Naruto's outlook on being Hokage never once matured. His outlook on Sasuke never once matured. Most of them ended up, characterwise, where they were at the end of the Chuunin exams or the last arc of part one at the latest. Characterwise little that happened between that point and the actual finale mattered all that much.
I personally disagree with the world building in regards to Kishi...in hindisight I feel he's actually pretty lousy. He creates a continent with 5 main nations shared by several smaller countries, but we never really get a chance to see this world outside of Konoha. Everyone is more or less the same culture with maybe minor variations, almost all the settings are the same forest.
When I think on the worldbuilding I tend to think about early in the manga when it seemed like a lot of thought was put into things like the Wave, but no, you bring up a good point. You're right. When you actually look at it, he's pretty crap. Which, honestly, leaves him with even less you could consider a strength.
It's been a real disappointment, over the last decade, slowly realizing anything I liked about the series was either a fluke, the idea of someone who left, not intended or a red herring. I really did give the guy too much credit for a while there.
Edited by dl316bh, 04 December 2018 - 07:22 PM.
. To me that's proof that these fanatic never even ONCE care about Naruto as character and his will or desire. And at the end of the day it's just like you said everyone not just the fanatic staff inside SP , it's rabid fan also somehow able to alter the ending (congratz to sawyer and forneverworld).
