Shruikan
Kage in the Making 👑
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The previous chapter left us with the big bombshell that the epic final battle between Sasuke and Naruto had left them both missing a forearm. The finale picks right back up at that shocking moment and shows what happens next. Basically Sasuke comes back to the light side. Naruto's selflessness and never-ending loyalty shows Sasuke that there are other ways to change the world that don't involve destroying large portions of it. It's all kind of rushed and hard to swallow after everything that happened, but if you've followed the series up to this point you should be used to that kind of thing.
As drastic as Sasuke's sudden change of heart may seem, it is still a big emotional moment. Sasuke goes into a monologue that is interspersed with artfully placed panels of the world recovering from the results of his actions, and a poignant shot of his friends grieving at Neji's grave.
However, what's not so satisfying is Sasuke's complete and utter pardon by Kakashi. It's all explained away in a couple of brief panels ending with Sasuke saying, "Yeah...sorry." That hardly seems adequate for the amount of death, destruction, and grief this guy has been responsible for. Granted, at this point he's so powerful it would be incredibly difficult to enforce any kind of capital punishment on him but one would at least hope for a deeper kind of emotional/spiritual penance or something. But, again, this is Naruto. Series creator Masashi Kishimoto has never been great at working out the finer plot details.
But Kishimoto is a master when it comes to relaying major concepts with simple but powerful visuals, and that's where we get the most memorable parts of this chapter. The image of the hands of the broken statues forming the seal of reconciliation with the outlines of Naruto and Sasuke overlaid is brilliant. And the final panel of chapter 699, with Naruto handing over Sasuke's scratched Konoha forehead protector that he'd kept for all this time, is beautiful. Even the most jaded of us had to have a little bit of the feels on that page.
With the battle over and Sasuke seemingly returned to the realm of sane people, we move to chapter 700 which serves as an epilogue. We fast forward a number years and we get what is essentially fan service for all the shippers out there. It seems like everybody in Konoha had a bunch of ***. And since the kids are all roughly the same age, it would appear this all happened around the same time. Perhaps Konoha experienced their own version of the Baby Boom once their war was over.
In a not-so-surprising development, Naruto and Hinata end up together and have a couple of soon-to-be genin of their own. The kids are cute, but they also follow the anime trope of being copies of their parents. Bolt, Naruto's son, is a chip off the old block and he's up to pretty much the same antics that Naruto committed as a kid. There's a certain poetic irony to this; Naruto grew up wanting a father figure to give him attention but he grew up to become a father who couldn't give his own son the kind of attention he wanted. Of course, the fact that he achieved his lifelong dream of becoming Hokage gives him somewhat of a pass because of the responsibility involved. But if things are now as peaceful as we're led to believe, one wonders just how busy he might be.Then we have perhaps the most controversial pairing: Sakura ended up with Sasuke, ruining the dreams of many Naruto-Sakura shippers. Of all the pairings, this does seem the strangest. Especially because the brief glimpse we get of Sasuke implies he's still walking the Earth and not too interested in being a father while Sakura gets stuck being a house wife. Not to mention how Sakura apparently still slept with the guy after all the grief he put her through. It just doesn't seem quite the happy ending that Sakura's fans deserved.
That's part of what makes the final chapter so bittersweet. On one hand, this chapter devotes time to a lot of fan-favorite characters and gives them (mostly) happy feel-good endings. On the other hand, some of the pairings seem odd, and the idea of the main characters having kids who are pretty much just miniature versions of themselves is cute but painfully unimaginative and repetitive since Kishimoto has done it before. On the other other hand (yes, that's three hands), there are many little subtle things in this chapter that make it so fun to read, including the Jolly Roger that Bolt paints on his father's Hokage monument; an obvious shout out to One Piece and its creator Eiichiro Oda, Kishimoto's friend and rival.
But the problems with this finale can easily be explained away by a simple truth: this ending really isn't a conclusion. The story of Naruto will go on. There will be a mini-series taking place between the time skip of chapters 699 and 700, and there will be at least one more movie. The Naruto franchise has so much storytelling potential that even the conclusion of the original manga isn't really the end of the story. So there's plenty of opportunity for new material that will fill in the missing bits. For now, we can rest assured that the little boy who no one seemed to want did have his wishes come true.
Source:
As drastic as Sasuke's sudden change of heart may seem, it is still a big emotional moment. Sasuke goes into a monologue that is interspersed with artfully placed panels of the world recovering from the results of his actions, and a poignant shot of his friends grieving at Neji's grave.
However, what's not so satisfying is Sasuke's complete and utter pardon by Kakashi. It's all explained away in a couple of brief panels ending with Sasuke saying, "Yeah...sorry." That hardly seems adequate for the amount of death, destruction, and grief this guy has been responsible for. Granted, at this point he's so powerful it would be incredibly difficult to enforce any kind of capital punishment on him but one would at least hope for a deeper kind of emotional/spiritual penance or something. But, again, this is Naruto. Series creator Masashi Kishimoto has never been great at working out the finer plot details.
But Kishimoto is a master when it comes to relaying major concepts with simple but powerful visuals, and that's where we get the most memorable parts of this chapter. The image of the hands of the broken statues forming the seal of reconciliation with the outlines of Naruto and Sasuke overlaid is brilliant. And the final panel of chapter 699, with Naruto handing over Sasuke's scratched Konoha forehead protector that he'd kept for all this time, is beautiful. Even the most jaded of us had to have a little bit of the feels on that page.
With the battle over and Sasuke seemingly returned to the realm of sane people, we move to chapter 700 which serves as an epilogue. We fast forward a number years and we get what is essentially fan service for all the shippers out there. It seems like everybody in Konoha had a bunch of ***. And since the kids are all roughly the same age, it would appear this all happened around the same time. Perhaps Konoha experienced their own version of the Baby Boom once their war was over.
In a not-so-surprising development, Naruto and Hinata end up together and have a couple of soon-to-be genin of their own. The kids are cute, but they also follow the anime trope of being copies of their parents. Bolt, Naruto's son, is a chip off the old block and he's up to pretty much the same antics that Naruto committed as a kid. There's a certain poetic irony to this; Naruto grew up wanting a father figure to give him attention but he grew up to become a father who couldn't give his own son the kind of attention he wanted. Of course, the fact that he achieved his lifelong dream of becoming Hokage gives him somewhat of a pass because of the responsibility involved. But if things are now as peaceful as we're led to believe, one wonders just how busy he might be.Then we have perhaps the most controversial pairing: Sakura ended up with Sasuke, ruining the dreams of many Naruto-Sakura shippers. Of all the pairings, this does seem the strangest. Especially because the brief glimpse we get of Sasuke implies he's still walking the Earth and not too interested in being a father while Sakura gets stuck being a house wife. Not to mention how Sakura apparently still slept with the guy after all the grief he put her through. It just doesn't seem quite the happy ending that Sakura's fans deserved.
That's part of what makes the final chapter so bittersweet. On one hand, this chapter devotes time to a lot of fan-favorite characters and gives them (mostly) happy feel-good endings. On the other hand, some of the pairings seem odd, and the idea of the main characters having kids who are pretty much just miniature versions of themselves is cute but painfully unimaginative and repetitive since Kishimoto has done it before. On the other other hand (yes, that's three hands), there are many little subtle things in this chapter that make it so fun to read, including the Jolly Roger that Bolt paints on his father's Hokage monument; an obvious shout out to One Piece and its creator Eiichiro Oda, Kishimoto's friend and rival.
But the problems with this finale can easily be explained away by a simple truth: this ending really isn't a conclusion. The story of Naruto will go on. There will be a mini-series taking place between the time skip of chapters 699 and 700, and there will be at least one more movie. The Naruto franchise has so much storytelling potential that even the conclusion of the original manga isn't really the end of the story. So there's plenty of opportunity for new material that will fill in the missing bits. For now, we can rest assured that the little boy who no one seemed to want did have his wishes come true.
Source:
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