Naruto

Naruto was the first anime that I had fortune to watch though I still like it,It will forever be wasted potential especially is naruto shippuden!

The main story itself is compelling enough that it doesn’t feel like reason just to get cool characters to fight it out (Which is the vibe I’m getting from Bleach from my experience of watching it so far. The story in Naruto is always expanding, new characters get introduced, new villains emerge and while a lot of the events in this series are set up for what’s to come in Shippuden (Especially in the Sasuke Retrieval Arc) it’s still worth watching to see where the characters grow and mold into the people they are later in the story (I say this because it seems quite a few people skip this series and start with Shippuden).
Not everything is flawless in this department, however. Naruto is notorious for having insane amounts of filler episodes and this show is one of the biggest offenders of this problem. It starts off harmless enough by having a recap episode, then a hot spring episode, a fun episode about Kakashi’s face and a five-episode arc about a race which would be fine if that was all it was. Instead of ending the show at the Sasuke Retrieval Arc, the show continues into 85 episodes of filler! Even for a long-running show like this one, 85 is an insane amount of filler episodes to have in a row. They even start the filler, right when the story was about to make it to the time-skip. While it was done to wait up for the manga, they could have just ended the original series and waited until they had enough material to start making Shippuden. Instead we got 85 episodes of low-quality random ninja missions that are close to unbearable to watch. I made it through the first few episodes of the first filler arc when I decided to stop and skip to the final episode. Even though this problem can be avoided now since you can just skip these episodes, it only really bugs me when I think of how long fans had to wait until the filler ended back when these episodes were airing. It may not be a problem now but it gets annoying when it still plagues Shippuden. But as I said before, you can just skip them now (Which is the most recommended option). So, in terms of the story department, Naruto does an excellent job considering all the filler is skippable.

The soundtrack is amazing. The songs are a nice mix of traditional Japanese music mixed in with badass guitar. The Main Theme of the series is one of the most memorable, iconic and beautiful pieces of music to anybody that’s seen this show. If you haven’t heard it, you owe it to yourself to listen to it since it’s probably the most amazing song in the whole soundtrack. In terms of Openings and Endings, Naruto proves once again that just because it’s a long-running Shounen, it doesn’t need to half-ass it’s theme songs. Every Opening is a memorable J-Rock tune and not one of them is bad. It’s hard to pick a favorite from these songs which is why mine is a three-way tie between Haruka Kanata (OP 2), GO!!! (OP 4) and No Boy, No Cry (OP 6). The ED’s, while not as good as the OP’s, are still good and get the job done as Ending songs. Wind (ED 1), Viva Rock (ED 3) and Ima made Nando mo (ED 5) are my favorites while the others are still good, but not the most memorable.
While I haven’t heard the Japanese voice acting since I watched the Dub, I can still judge the Dub and my god, is this a damn good Dub. Every voice actor hits the mark with every character they play. Maile Flanagan does an amazing job as Naruto and Yuri Lowenthal (who is one of my favourite voice actors) does one of my favourite performances from the show, as Sasuke who is one of the most iconic characters from the show. Tara Platt also does an amazing job as Temari considering that her performance is one of the main reasons that I like Temari so much. Other notable performances are Steven Blum as Zabuza and Orochimaru, Steve Stayley as Neji, Stephanie Sheh as Hinata, David Lodge as Jiraiya and Liam O’Brien as Gaara. Every other performance of the other main characters was also great but those were some of the best ones that were worth mentioning. If you couldn’t tell, Naruto also does a great job in the Sound department.

My favorite character in Naruto was Sasuke Uchiha. A fascinating character really… & the most misunderstood man in the story. So many people call him emo, childish , power hungry.. arrogant… evil.. so many negative adjectives.

Overall, As I stated before Naruto is very controversial. I genuinely enjoyed this anime, the show after The Final Fight may be filler, but if you are starting anime I can't recommend this anime anymore. The Shounen genre has a vast amount of anime, Naruto is one of the better ones believe me compared to other big three. Naruto is a legendary anime that could never be replaced, its extremely important to the community.