Let’s build a bridge together!
What They Say:
“Ninshu: The Ninja Creed”
The Infinite Tsukuyomi does not affect Hashirama, Tobirama, Hiruzen and Minato because they are reanimated. Hagoromo, the Sage of the Six Paths, appears and explains to the four that Hashirama and Madara are the reincarnations of his sons Ashura and Indra. Hagoromo recounts the tale of how he founded Ninshu, the Ninja Creed, and about the lives of Ashura and Indra.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With a solid bit of action the last time around, Naruto: Shippuden at least proved to be a bit more accessible simply by dealing with our modern era characters as opposed to those from the past. The past is now a huge part of this arc, and has been to varying degrees within the series overall, and I’ve had real issues with the way the past is currently impacting things. What we get in the prologue here is a decent enough recap to some degree as we get the Sage of Six Paths filling in folks with what’s going on and how they’re going against Kaguya as part of something from this past, so everyone is at least on the same page with a minor info-dump. I still don’t care for the overall premise of everything being dictated by events from ages ago, however.
So when we get another flashback piece after the opening credits that has the Sage Toad and the Sage of Six Paths talking and said Toad talks about the far flung future with the blonde haired and blue-eyed kid, well, you lose me more. Making all of this preordained to some degree just removes so much of the struggle because it plays that whole ‘everything exists at once’ angle and things are hard to change because they’ve already happened. A decent chunk of the first half has Hagoromo going on his journey and spending that time rebuilding a bridge that one of the locals thinks isn’t his job. It’s a lot of “small politics” in a way where some people are just contrary for a host of reasons and while it has its merits as a morality tale, it’s bloody boring as hell after seven hundred episodes of this series to be reduced to this.
In Summary:
The show goes into a lot more of what happens in the past here that leads to other things, and it’s interesting material to some degree in setting the foundations for so much of what happened in the lands here ever since, but it’s once again just so poorly place and coming after so much filler that it does not excite. I suspect a lot of long time watchers are like I am at this point in that we’re just running down the clock and waiting for it to end because we’ve been with it for as long as we have. This is the kind of material that we needed during the various arcs we had before of anime-original material to help expand the narrative. At this stage, it’s just dragging it all out. I mean, let’s be honest, yes, there is meaning to the whole bridge building thing here. But it’s more than half the episode and just slows down the narrative once again as we move into this new background arc. It’s like half a step forward, five steps back.
Grade: D
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
