What They Say:Naruto and the others finally regain their lost memories regarding Yota. Years ago, the Leaf Village kids came to befriend Yota, but the adults believed the young boy was a spy and took him away for questioning.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With the way this arc has run its course, you know it’s being drawn out in general and it just wears you down episode after episode. While I had been mildly okay with it in general when the first one hit, even though I hate this process of creating someone new to fill in a filler gap, it’s when it hit a second episode that I rolled my eyes. That it required a third just says how much they wanted to stretch things out for whatever reasons they find required at the moment to do so. Suffice to say, each new piece of this has been one more long slog through an already dull story made even worse. What continues to kill it for me is that it goes back to the very, very young Naruto and friends crowd which is what pushed me away from a lot of the first series when they were just a bit older.
With this episode, the present day material is minimal for the most part as Naruto and the others realize what’s going on with Yota and that he’s actually a reanimated version rather than the person they thought they knew from the past. The bulk of the episode is spent on the past with the kids doing what they can to help little Yota and his mission, but it’s just a series of comical embarrassments along the way with how they all perform given their ages. One of its major themes is the bond that they all share with Yota, which results in Yota knowing that what’s best at the end is to remove him from their memories, which was still there deep below the surface. But those bonds that were created because of Yota also reverted to how it was before for Naruto, leaving him alone again after having a brief flicker of being accepted. And that would have changed who he was immensely going forward, hence his frustration with Yota in the here and now as they deal with each other.
In Summary:
I’ll be honest, I can’t care one whit about Yota, his story or the reworked past that they try to introduce here for Naruto and the others. It’s all shoehorned in since they can’t do anything that would upset the manga continuity that they’re adapting, so it’s like the movies in a lot of ways where it has to standalone and tell its own self contained story. Those can be done well – see the Power arc that I’ll unfortunately be referencing for awhile – but the series more often than not goes for the kinds of things we get here in this arc. An overly long, dull and uninteresting work with characters that we’re likely to never see again or even referenced in a casual way. Not everything has to be connected, but when you do things like this, it has to mean something. And Yota just felt insulting from the get go.
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