The Naruto manga ended once again today. It was a great ending proving that Salad really was the biological daughter of Sasuke and Sakura, and that Sasu x Saku's relationship is swimming along just fine even all these years later.
That's one more cliffhanger resolved in this cliffhanger heavy period. So with the manga over, what happens next? A new Naruto video game, Storm 4, is coming out for the PS4. It looks plenty fun. A new movie, written by Kishimoto and thus canon, comes out this August in Japan, called Bolt. The rest of the world should see it a year later. The tv anime is still ongoing, and doesn't look likely to end any time soon since it's nowhere near caught up with the manga. There are still more Naruto light novels, endorsed by Kishimoto so canon, set after the ending of the manga, coming out even as we speak.
If the anime wished to adapt all those epilogue light novels it could go on for seemingly ever. If it doesn't the anime will probably end sometime in 2016. Or it could go off onto some filler tangent and last forever, though that hardly sounds very appetizing.
As things stand though, Naruto isn't going anywhere. Movies, books, video games, and anime are still going strong. Perhaps one day all hope will fail us and it will be the end of Naruto, but it is not this day. This day we continue to watch!
Naruto: The Last movie comes out to the outside world July 22nd. As the love story between Hinata and Naruto, it's going to be an amazing moment in the franchise. Almost as good as the upcoming FF7 remake is going to be. Naruto's sun hasn't set yet.
Meanwhile, I finished rewatching Dragon Ball Kai in time for the first episode of Super. Once Buu appears the series really goes downhill. They had endless chances to beat Buu but blew them all, imperiling the universe for no good reason. But oh well. With all that behind us, Super has the chance to set things right and make a good story once more.
One Piece wrapped up its Dressrosa arc with this chapter. Sabo beating Burgess was nice. Bleach is back to the present day war, still with so many characters not featured yet that the story is nowhere near a suitable ending spot.
Hibike! Euphonium had a marvelous ending, but that still begs the question -- if it's such a good series, why adapt only the first light novel? There are already four of them out in the wild. The series should have kept going, not stopped at just 13 episodes. With such an unsatisfactory stopping point and such small length, how much praise can I really give the show? Sometimes short series can make up in quality by delivering a climactic ending and a self-contained story with all the loose threads wrapped up. Hibike! Euphonium doesn't offer either of these advantages. It has loose threads, no climax, and is short in length. That's a pretty bitter pill to swallow. I can't justify upping its rank much further without a sequel being announced sometime in the future. I'm totally unsatisfied with how things stand now, even if Kyoto animation is amazing in coming up with 63 separate character designs and drawing them all to spectacular levels of detail and beauty. I don't question how much effort they put into these 13 episodes, but there's only so much you can do with just the beginning of a story. Like usual, the remaining light novels aren't translated so everyone outside of Japan is just screwed, never knowing what happens for the rest of time.
The women's World Cup has reached the best possible development, with Japan facing the USA in the final. No matter who wins at this point I win, but I'm cheering for the USA this time around. I think the USA is the better team and they deserve the win, plus they're my homeland so I can't be too callous towards them.
Having finished the Grisaia visual novel, I've now started up on the Majikoi visual novel. The visual novel so far has virtually no overlap with the anime, but there's been nothing good enough to complain about the anime cutting so far. Some funny jokes and some thorough (some might say repetitive) characterization doesn't really justify the amount of time they've taken setting up the story so far. I prefer the anime which managed to be just as funny and characterize its characters just as thoroughly in a lot shorter time window. I assume at some point the anime and visual novel will start overlapping, which will relieve me of the worry that the anime wasn't just entirely filler. I'm also hoping that at some point the visual novel will have something really cool the anime didn't, or else reading the visual novel was a complete waste of time. So far that just hasn't been the case though.
The summer anime season has begun. Look forward to my first impressions post once all the shows have had their chance to shine~
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