What They Say:
A reanimated boy who can control weather appears before Team Ino-Shika-Cho, Sakura, and Kiba, who are all fighting in different locations. To their surprise, the boy seems to know them.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
As much as I try to not complain about it week after week, it gets hard to do when there’s some really bad episodes that are designed to stretch things out while everything else is going on. The need for filler is always there when dealing with long running series and ones that need to let the manga get further ahead. But is as often the case with these things, it just proves that the creative side of the teams behind the adaptations aren’t all that creative, or they bring in the second stringers and give them too much room to do things. That gives us things like the whole flashback food challenge. The Power arc we had before is most definitely the exception to the rule, but it’s hard to remember anything else in the fill realm being as enjoyable as that – or well put together.
With this episode, things are getting a little dicey in the present as the array of shinobi we see from the Hidden Leaf are dealing with someone who has control over weather, or at least appears so. It takes a little bit, but we learn that it’s a child that they all realize is Yota, someone from their pasts as a young child themselves. Which, naturally, leads us to that flashback experience that shows us several of them as kids, such as Ino, Shikamaru and Choji. While they’re out in the forest, they run across the same kid, pinned to a trip by kunai, and crying pretty intensely. With Yota being reanimated here in the present, and controlled elsewhere with emotions running high in his own body, we get a mix of back and forth with past and present to see how the gang knew him as kids and how hard it is to see him in this state in the present.
In Summary:
Much like Yota throughout the episode and the Leaf ninjas when they were kids, I just wanted to cry throughout this episode. The continued adding in of stories from an already busy past – when there’s so much more that could be done in the present to flesh out the war – just highlights once again what can only be a lack of caring or competence when it comes to designing stories for the filler arc of the show. Filler is expected for shows of this nature, but as we keep seeing, they’re being made more for the youngest members of the audience – the ones who may not really grasp or appreciate some of what the main storyline is doing. This episode is just mindnumbing on a number of levels, even if there are cute bits with the gang as young kids once again. You just want to bang your head against something.
Grade: C-
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
thanks for the review (sorry you had to suffer thru it) ..saves me the trouble of bothering to download it
I keep hoping for some good filler because I know they can do it sometimes, but this was just another mind numbing one.
yea, it’s a shame.. :-/ ,.. I think they really need to try telling a brand new story within the same universe ..something that they can switch back to whenever they need filler .. *sigh* we can but dream