Naruto Shippuden as well as Naruto as a franchise is a series I have a complicated relationship with over the years, as a kid I remember liking the story pre timeskip or "Part 1" a lot, even after my brief break with anime from 2008-2012, I did eventually pick up Shippuden and I recall enjoying the story to varying degrees at least the canon stuff up until the War arc. I skipped all the fillers of course, but one major issue with the Shippuden series is that there is A LOT a filler in between major arcs and A LOT of mixed canon filler when the major arcs did get adapted and it only got worse when the series went on especially during the War arc, it eventually got to a point where I started to hate the post time skip parts of the series for almost 10 years since I stopped watching the series back in 2014, now I'm watching the series 10 years later and much of my thoughts are the same just that now, it's much easier to watch since all the episodes are avaliable and I can skip all the mixed canon filler. Going to separate this review to 3 sections, "the good", "the bad" and "the ugly".
The Good - The pacing of the major arcs is mostly pretty good. There is going to be mixed canon filler stuff like during the Kazekage Rescue and the battle on the Tenchi Bridge but I have watched stuff like the original 90s anime of Dragon Ball Z, so I'm kind of used to the way some of the longer fights can be especially the battle on the Tenchi Bridge. In spite of all this, Naruto Shippuden up until the War arc managed to avoid something that plagues many long running shows, not just shonen which "arc fatigue". Every section pre War arc never lasted overly long and new story arcs were getting introduced at a reasonable pace. At the very least the staus quo does change by the end of the series and all though characters like Sasuke are problematic, at the very least he doesn't take the entire series to kill Itachi.
The Akatsuki are also pretty good villains, most if not all of them have their own goals and motivations for joining and avoid being the "generic doomday villain" which is stuff you can find with a lot of stories that feature many villains or superhero team up stories where they just write villains for the sake of adding a number so they can challenge more heroes. Pain is also a better villain than I remember him for being too, when I first watched the Pain arc, I found his "pain" monologues to be dull and monotonous but now, it's kind of interesting where he esstentially wants everyone to understand each other by feeling the pain of others and everyone feeling pain. It's more interesting I initally gave him credit for.
Characters like Sakura and Shikimaru are given more to do now especially how Shikimaru is given his own arc now and starts to change and mature as a character, he was already a great character in Part 1 and Part 2 and post timeskips just makes him better. Sakura is also less annoying by comparison to Part 1 and she is even given a major victory and even tries to take matter into her own hands. I wouldn't call her a great character by any means but she does become someone I can sort of respect as opposed to character like Hinata who I already discussed in my Last Naruto movie review.
One final positive is that while characters do get brought back, I admire Naruto for actually killing off it's major character like Jiraiya and outside of say, Orochimaru all the characters are brought back for a temporary time and then are written out of the story. Orochimaru being alive is somewhat understandable since he sort of has immortality to sorts to begin with. Naruto at the very least avoids an issue that plagued a show like Yu Yu Hakusho where that series was just too scared to kill off any of it's major characters and Togashi would often pull punches much of the time. Final positive is that Naruto, while I'm not going to call him a great character due to reasons later on does slowly start to mature and become more tolerable the more the story goes on, even if his "talk no jutsu" requires heavy amounts of suspension of disbelief, I'd take this over keeping villains alive and then having them still remain evil, neither is great, but talk no jutsu is slightly more tolerable. I do commend Naruto to varying degrees that the series' status quo is completely different by the end of the series compared to the start.
The Bad - Shippuden does have a lot of good going for it but there is just one issue that plagues the series that prevents it from being consistently enjoyable and that is both the character of Sasuke Uchiha and his relationship with Naruto. Many of often cited the Chunin Exams of Naruto to be the high point of the series but there is just one big major problem with it, that arc splintered Naruto's audience, there's two kinds of Naruto fans, those who watch it for Naruto and Sasuke's "friendship" and rivalry and those who watch it for the side characters, I'm sort of in the latter but a huge problem that plagued Naruto and Sasuke is the fact that Kishimoto wants you to think Naruto and Sasuke has been together for so long when in reality, they were only together for the Land of the Waves arc all the way to Sasuke's fight with Yaroi. When Sasuke says, "you are the one I want to fight the most" to Naruto. That is the last geniune interaction Naruto and Sasuke even have. After this there is lots of episodes where Naruto and Sasuke don't speak or have interactions with each other, this becomes a problem the more series goes on. The series loves to tell you Sasuke and Naruto have been on tons of life threatning adventures together but that isn't really the entire pre timeskip of Naruto. Technically speaking when only counting canon, Naruto only really spent time with Sasuke during the Land of the Waves and Forest of Death, thats it but Kishimoto will love to act like he's done so much legwork and pats himself on the back for it.
This is pretty much where the problem lies, Naruto in Part 2 spends so much of the series chasing after Sasuke instead of trying to achieve his own goals. The series will bring this up constantly on how Sasuke chose to leave and how Naruto could've gotten "stronger" instead of chasing Sasuke, the self awareness doesn't make Naruto come off less of a creepy yandere. The thing with Naruto is that he CAN be a good character but he shines whenever Sasuke is not around. I kind of get what the series was going for to some degree but Kishimoto loves to think he did the leg work when he didn't. If Naruto and Sasuke didn't have such a lack of screen time gap inbetween Sasuke's fight with Yaroi and when Sasuke left the village and if they had more missions together than MAYBE I would want Naruto to have Sasuke come over to the light side but instead Naruto just comes off as a stalker.
Then there is Sasuke and I will give the series this in that he eventually kills Itachi but for one he was just a dull and one note character who just acts stoic and not much else especially how lacks compassion for so much of Shippuden. After Sasuke kills Itachi, he spends much of the series being a one note revenge driven psycho who wants to destroy the Leaf Village in spite of the fact that if it weren't for a retcon(Sasuke would be dead if it weren't for Tsunade, so Itachi was never really that sympathetic) yet Sasuke believes that Itachi was ultimately good. The funny thing in all this is, that it weren't for the reanimations of Itachi and Hashirama, Sasuke would've never have temporaily turned face during the War arc so Naruto's ploy to bring Sasuke back to the village is rendered that much more rudundant. Sasuke does admittedly became a more interesting character post War arc since he actually has some compassion to show with the stoicism by saving those kids in the fighting arena.
The Ugly - Basically everything War arc related, you can put in the entire arc minus Obito's face turn. I'll be positive for a minute that I think Obito while not being a good villain was the most tolerable part of the arc since he's the only villain that remained a player all the way through rather than eventually getting written out like Mardara and Kabuto were. As for the War arc itself, where do I start, it's full of red herrings and retcons. I'll start with the red herrings, there's many but there's mainly just two, the Kages, the Allied Shinobi Force itself and Madara Uchiha. The first few sections of the arc is painfully boring because they are basically focusing on side character and since I knew how this played out, will eventually get taken out of the story like Choji and Darui. The Allied Shinobi Force basically become one big protect mission for Naruto and eventually Team 7 and the resurrected Shinobi who weren't undone by Itachi and the Kages who basically jump started the arc and had a summit arc dedicated too them ultimately get beaten by Madara off screen and get put in the dream world. All of these are big hyped up parts that lead to nothing.
The retcons are too numerous to count and they aren't even good ones. I can be here all day and this write up has gone on long enough but the biggest ones are the Indra and Ashura and Black Zetsu ones. The former makes Naruto and Sasuke magically connected by destiny and robs them of their agency and the Black Zetsu one writes out the Madara out of the story, a villain they were fighting for episodes on end. They were fighting Madara for so many episodes and they don't even beat him. This makes the War arc look worse in the long run. It makes Kaguya look worse since she was the villain the good guys were able to beat and Madara had to be taken out by someone else.
The War arc wouldn't be so bad but the filler makes it even worse. The pacing makes an arc that was already horrible and slows the pacing down to a crawl. There's filler episodes every few episodes between the canon ones, you can skip those but then there is mixed canon filler which is sometimes hard to tell which is canon or not, it got so bad, that I got the Naruto manga out side by side with the anime and had to look up what parts can be skipped since the most popular anime filler sites don't tell you which parts are supposed to be skipped.
One more thing I will say is that the ending up to episode 500 isn't that great. The last 7 episodes focuses on a wedding, ship and character I already don't care about and it ends on promoting Boruto a show I don't even want to watch. It really does suck for the people who watch Shippuden back in 2007 just to be told, "now the adventures continue in Boruto".
Overall, Naruto especially Shippuden, or Part 2, or post time skip is one of the biggest mixed bags of an anime I have ever watched. There are good parts, there's bad and there's parts that made me wonder what why I was even watching. As it is now, the Naruto Shippuden anime is hard to geniunely reccomend. If you want to watch the Naruto story and not read manga, Naruto Kai might be ideal and the Storm games might also be better than the Shippuden anime especially during the War arc, say what you want about Storm 3's non canon ending but it did make the Kage look more powerful and the anime is full of non canon stuff anyway. It depends on how much you of a gamer you are. As it stands, unless it's been another 10 years or I'm really feeling nostalgic, then I might watch Naruto Shippuden again but hopefully by then, a real Naruto Kai gets made.
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