Almost done… aaaaalmost done….
What They Say:
Sasuke and Sakura join up with the others, but the Puppet User appears and blocks their path back to the Hidden Leaf Village. Sasuke wants to bring down the puppets and rush back to report to the Fourth Hokage, but Shikamaru and the others insist on staying and rescuing the jonin.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Even when shows are at their worst I do prefer to try and give them as fair a shake as possible and look at them as they’re done. I’ve actually done that with a whole lot of the Naruto and Shippuden series in that I’ve gone through all the anime original material, talked about what worked and what didn’t, and gave it as fair a shake as I could. Even when it took up months and months of time as there were periods where it made sense in that they couldn’t get to what they needed to. And even the first few episodes of this arc I gave a fair shake with what it was trying to do in giving itself a little room to really get ready for the final run while allowing some of the cast that would get sidelined to have their moments with individual episodes.
But this storyline, the story within a dream, just leaves me so disgusted with it because it takes pointless and parades around in saying how pointless it is. Even worse is that it’s an alternate timeline design within a dream that takes us back to when the characters were younger and far, far, far, less interesting.
Frankly, I hate doing reviews like this because there’s so little to really say and I feel like an old man yelling at clouds. Naruto filler bad. Not always true, but by golly it’s so completely true with this arc that I want the last episode of these filler to be 23 minutes of an apology from the producers for putting not only the viewers through this but the staff.
As noted in the Crunchyroll comments for this one, “Fun Fact – 36 out of the 44 episodes released this year have been fillers.”
In Summary:
The only reason this doesn’t get an F outright is because I have to admire that the animators are doing as well as they are in turning in competent work that looks good and is well animated. They could easily just turn in garbage – and they have before – but they’re putting in the effort with these terrible scripts and doing their best. That’s the only thing that keeps it from being an utter failure.
Grade: D
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70″ LED 1080P HDTV, Apple TV via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
From what I hear this god-aweful story within a dream filler will continue until the end of this month. If we still get more Tsukiyomi fillers after this I can only hope they do more for the story and characters than this here. Maybe you should consider holding off and doing one final review for these Tsunade dream episodes to save yourself having to repeat stuff because we all know what the grades will be anyway.
I’ve just completely stopped watching. They put so many fillers into the final villain that I can’t even remember how it started.