Summary: Boruto has so far been a poor followup to Naruto. The art is low quality and inconsistent and the action lacks flow and power. The story is rushed and contradictory and seems to be forgoing everything good about Naruto in favor of elevating powerlevels even more.
Following up on a story that focused on the maturation of it's characters is always hard, especially when it's one as successful as Naruto. That said, so far Boruto seems to do virtually everything that others stories that tried doing this and failed have done in the past.
I'm gonna begin by talking about the art though, because that's something
...
a lot of people have trouble with and isn't really related to the rest of my complaints. I don't actually have a problem with Kishimoto's decision to hand the reigns over to a new artist, in fact I kinda like it given that it both fits thematically with the work and it allows him to work on that new sci-fi thing he talked about in 2015. The problem is that I don't think the art is really good enough.
One of the big issues I think a lot of people have with Ikemoto's art is the characters. He uses much softer looking, more rounded lines which ends up giving all his characters a more feminine look. Now admittedly this was something that Kishimoto actually said he was bad at doing himself so it's possible that the girls suddenly looking like they're from a completely different manga was done on his instruction but in my eyes some of the design changes just go too far and overall don't look very good.
That problem is compounded by the halfhearted attempt to match the style of the original. The reason I say "halfhearted" is because sometimes Ikemoto just plain old doesn't try to draw the character the same way as normal. This is most noticable with Boruto, because sometimes his hair will suddenly get a lot shorter and curly just like the female characters, but frankly the art is just inconsistent all throughout. If Ikemoto was just going to do the manga in his own style then fine, I don't like it that much but I'll accept it, but just stick to one style! Honestly I find it rather shocking that someone who has been working on this series for over 15 years has seemingly regressed in his ability to match Kishimoto's style. If you read back through the series you can find some background characters that match the style of Boruto, but they still look closer to the original series than a lot of what we have now. Also, he seems to by trying to keep the original style more with the men while just doing his own thing almost all the time with the women, which just makes it even more jarring.
The final problem I have with the art is the action sequences. I mean, overall the art in the series is pretty mediocre but the action sequences are the worst. At around page 32 of chapter 3 (page number might change depending on how you read it) you can see a clear example. You see Lee's kid in a really awkward pose fighting a poorly shaded enemy. If you look at his hair and pose it seems like he's lunging forward and down. Only the lower half of his leg has any speed lines and they seem to be implying that his leg is going straight up. Also his foot is missing. In the next panel you see that he's completed a roundhouse kick that doesn't really match the direction his leg was coming from at all, the speedlines are still only on the lower half of his leg despite his whole leg moving (they also look really weird and I'm not sure what kind of motion they're meant to show), and he's jumped in the air for some reason despite not really having been in any position to do that. The biggest sin though is how the enemy is just flying away from him with NO indication that he actually kicked him. If you're going to have a fight that consists of a single hit, not actually showing that hit is just awful, especially considering how much Kishimoto used showing the moment of impact to great effect. There are plenty of other instances of awkward poses that don't have any impact and just plain old look weird, so I'm not gonna bother pointing them all out, but I would recommend checking out 5/12, just because Sakura's pose is so stupid it's honestly hilarious.
I do want to criticize one major problem with the fight sequences specifically though, and that's the speed lines. They're worthless, and this is weird because apparently one of Ikemoto's jobs was adding white to the speedlines, so how he managed to do that for over a decade without noticing how Kishimoto used them is a complete mystery to me. Kishimoto's speedlines were excellent. They gave a sense of power and speed to his action sequences, but more than that they tied the flow of the actions together. Just look back at Lee Vs. Garaa. You can see exactly where Lee has been in the trail he leaves behind. You can see how badly he's been hit by the intensity and length of them. That is completely lacking in Boruto, and I think Ikemoto's failure to use speedlines properly is one of the major contributors to this. He draws them far to short, makes awkward angles with perspective, and rarely seems to consider how the rest of the body is moving aside from whatever limb is the focus of the movement. Because of this, it often just looks like characters are teleporting around the battlefield trading awkward blows that do no damage. It just lacks any sense of continuity, power, or speed.
Now I'm not just here to bash Boruto so I want to point out something that I feel he's done fairly well with the art, and that's the shading. Naruto has always been a very well shaded series. Kishimoto eschewed overusing screentones and preferred to do the majority of his shading by hand, which is one of the things that gives Naruto it's distinctive, sometimes downright grimy look. Ikemoto has continued this, and while I do think it's not quite as good as it used to be it still looks good and is a refreshing departure from how much screentone you see in other manga.
Now that I've gotten the artwork out of the way, onto the story.
To begin with, I'm just not even gonna talk about the opening. Yes, it is the main character narrating over a suspenseful scene, only to tell you that the story starts a while back and you need to learn more to get up to this point and jumping back into the past to actually begin the story. There is just so much I could say about that that I'm not even gonna bother touching it. Who knows, maybe down the line we'll find out that Kodachi actually had some brilliant reason for doing that. Speaking of which, why on earth was he even picked for this? If I was picking a writer for the followup to one of the most popular manga since DBZ I wouldn't go with a guy who wrote part of the script for a few anime that honestly weren't that amazing. He's never even worked on a manga before for goodness sakes!
Anyways, the story has been super underwhelming so far. Despite being called "Next Generation" the enemies they fight start up exactly where Naruto left off. Yup that's right, it's taken less chapters than the number of YEARS Naruto was in print for fight scenes against overpowered, mysterious god enemies who control the power of the final boss of the series to start happening. And yes, that remains true even if you account for the fact that Boruto's chapters are twice as long as Naruto's.
Don't forget your jutsus though! Naturally, a generation of children who grew up in peacetime are able to use techniques their parents trained years for with no problems. No, having their techniques be slightly smaller than their parents doesn't make things better. Choji had to take drugs and almost kill himself to do partial expansion yet somehow his daughter can do it effortlessly while younger than him? One of the best parts of the original series was how it showed the characters growth. There were entire arcs dedicated to characters training to learn moves, which worked so well with the series themes of growth. In this though? Characters can learn techniques which took multiple arcs to learn in the length of a single chapter. This is incredibly infuriating because a major theme of this new series appears to be that the characters have to learn not to take shortcuts and learn techniques with their own power, but apparently Kodachi doesn't actually want to bother writing training arcs so he just gives characters powers after a few pages with some implied training.
I also want to point out that he chooses Konohamaru to introduce and recommend the shortcut to training in the first place, as well as him doing some of the miracle montage training. While not something that's necessarily wrong plotwise I just think it shows how deep some of the problems with the writing go when the character who represented the idea that "there are no shortcuts to hard work" is recommending a shortcut to hard work in the story and being used as one by the author.
The final complaint I have is sort of a followup to the previous issue. So far, a great many things that got their own, sometimes very long, arcs in the original series have been skimmed over in a couple of pages, I think mainly to speed up the appearance of super powered DBZ fight scenes against literal gods. I know I said I wasn't going to talk about this but seriously, the series is so impatient to show off that characters are gonna have super high powerlevels that it wastes the first pages to show you the MC fighting Notsuke over the rubble of Konoha. It's like the series is in a mad dash to quickly distance itself form everything good about the original in favor of raising the powerlevel even higher.
Just stop. The characters literally defeated god. Recently we've had successful series like Boku no Hero or Assasination Classroom that show that people still love stories about the process of learning instead of just wanting to see how OP the main character can get next. We even have One Punch Man which is purely devoted to making fun of outrageous powerlevel escalation. I know Naruto got full of overpowered nonsense toward the end but honestly that was the weakest part of the whole series for me. Boruto feels like a completely wasted chance to restart with what made the series so popular to being with.
 Alternative TitlesSynonyms: Naruto Gaiden: Michita Tsuki ga Terasu Michi, Naruto: The Path Lit by the Full Moon Japanese: BORUTO-ボルト- -NARUTO NEXT GENERATIONS- More titlesInformationType: Manga
Volumes: 20
Chapters: 81
Status: Finished
Published: May 9, 2016 to Apr 21, 2023
Theme:
Martial Arts
Demographic:
Shounen
Serialization:
V-Jump Statistics Ranked: #114172 2 based on the top manga page. Please note that 'R18+' titles are excluded. Popularity: #103
Members: 119,174
Favorites: 3,618 Available AtResources | Reviews
Filtered Results: 11 / 50
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Apr 19, 2017
Summary: Boruto has so far been a poor followup to Naruto. The art is low quality and inconsistent and the action lacks flow and power. The story is rushed and contradictory and seems to be forgoing everything good about Naruto in favor of elevating powerlevels even more.
Following up on a story that focused on the maturation of it's characters is always hard, especially when it's one as successful as Naruto. That said, so far Boruto seems to do virtually everything that others stories that tried doing this and failed have done in the past. I'm gonna begin by talking about the art though, because that's something ... 
Nov 10, 2020
CONTAINS SPOILERS UNTIL CHAPTER 51
Having seen all those highly scored reviews in the main page, I wanted to make a review myself for this clusterfuck story that is called Boruto. First of all, I want to say that I'm a HUGE Naruto fanboy as you can see it from my profile picture, so don't think that I'm one of those snob shonen haters. I grew up with Naruto, and I love it despite all of its mistakes and poor storytelling choices. However, that's not the case with Boruto. I love Boruto's movie and the first 60-70 episodes of the anime, I really do. Boruto and Sarada ... 
Oct 21, 2022 Not Recommended Funny  Preliminary
(100/81 chp)
Let's start easy:
Is Boruto a manga? Yes. Is Boruto the worst fucking manga I've ever read? Yes. Is it the worst thing that I've ever seen in Jump? Also yes. Bordo is a terrible series authored by a pedophile who can't fucking draw and definitely can't write. When Naruto ended after an excruciating 2-year final battle, Kishimoto chose his favorite pupil to help make the ill-fated Samurai 8. Wanting to wash his hands from this series forever, he chose some mongoloid he kept in a basement to draw this pile of shit, presumably as a joke, thinking it would crash and burn. Well, fast-forward years later and people are ...
Sep 12, 2022
Spoiler ..... Or whatever.
This is the first and last manga I have read or more I have to read it. The problem can be discussed all day long. However, I must keep this as brief as possible. First that art style and ark work worse things in the manga. Character design is uncomfortable. Black and white color, the same black for the background, clothes, skills, and every random thing are unexpectedly bad, why not use simple black and white? This manga is completely mess and Here problems inconsistencies and fallings of the script, 1. Every character is dumb as f*** The characters giving away vital information ...
Sep 16, 2023
Hey everyone, Just a short review on 'the great(sarcasm) Boruto'.
When I read it first time, in starting it was good(I felt that it might be successful) but when I read further the manga, it started to feel like plain and boring and was not fun(which a shonen manga should be). I just felt like: "Yeah!! Just finish the chapter and get on to other manga". This is the first manga that made me feel like that. 1. Why it's not fun? - As you know, that the new generation kids gets powerups out of nowhere and get some more powerups, from gods know where. Some boruto ... 
Jun 5, 2021
I want to preface this by saying that I really tried to give Boruto so many chances and am still reading the series, but reading the most recent chapters made me so annoyed that I am now writing this review.
When I read the first like 5 pages of chapter 1 of Boruto, I was immediately expecting a dumpster fire. At the end of Boruto's Dad's story, Naruto fulfilled his dreams, became Ninja Jesus, Sasuke became Ninja Batman, and Naruto had an annoying son to remind him of what he used to be. It wasn't a perfect ending, but I still remember feeling happy and emotional ... 
Jul 1, 2019
Spoiler Free Review (up-to-date with manga chapter 35):
I refrained from writing a review on Boruto the manga because I was hopeful it would change directions. However it has only gotten worse. To start off I understand that this is about the new generation. The problem though is that they do bring back a lot of old faces, but those old characters are written poorly and not true to themselves. Everything from motives, personality, even power scaling is entirely wrong about the old characters. Some characters from the original series that would rank high on tier lists are simply so weak in Boruto. Then there are the new ... 
Oct 11, 2021
This review will be short and sweet. Actually, instead of sweet, I would rather use harsh. Following are the points that explain my score for the manga-
1. It merely serves as a template for the anime. Way too fast-paced without any real character development but rather character highlights. 2. Even though it serves as a template for the anime there are some severe inconsistencies between the anime and manga. Case in point- Sarada in the anime is shown to have a 2 tomoe Sharingan in the fight against boro and had a 1 tomoe Sharingan till then. In the manga, however, she has a 3 tomoe ... 
Feb 19, 2021
Having been a huge fan of the Naruto series for more than 10 years, I've started reading the boruto manga thinking it would be as good as the Boruto Movie which had some great moments.
It initially started good and the arcs after the movie arc were alright only with a downside of the new manga drawings which are considerably worse than Kishimoto's on Naruto Manga and the characters generally look fat and some people like Sasuke look straight up ugly. But that aside, as more time passed and new arcs and the big villain (ish) appeared, the plot went into the classic path of ...
Sep 30, 2022
What NOT to do when writing a sequel with zombies running
A long time ago or only 7 years ago. The Pierrot company was too greedy for existence. They were known for milking franchises and having unprofessional directors. An impressive effort was made to milk the classic action franchise with the help of a voice cast of Automatic Labor. The plan was simple and low-minded. A huge iP reach to end and they've to bring back fans and make them watch their new show forever. What will they show them forever? It's a dumb goofy sitcom that also teaches important lessons about life. The life lessons such ... 
Sep 4, 2021
INGLES:
+ HISTORY AND CHARACTERS: (2), (2): Boruto would have been better if possible than it had never existed and I divide it into several points: -the fact of having a supposed "peace" between villages renders the ninja concept meaningless. -At the end of Naruto the balance of power was broken and the two protagonists Sasuke and Naruto are very powerful so a scale of power of a new generation would obviously be lower so the protagonism would be null for them and that leads to others points: * The new generation is the most talented in history by obligation of the script, in addition other things must be ... |
