Naruto: Shippuden Season 12 (2012)
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Naruto: Shippuden Season 12 Review
The twelfth season of Naruto: Shippuden is easily the weakest one so far with so many problems and very few real strengths.
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“Ya know, ha?
You really are my son“
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This is most definitely the turning point for the series and the season in which the show takes a deep dive towards mediocrity. I do realize that many could love this, but I am not one of them. I have never liked stories with war, chaos and all those other “epic” qualities and I certainly did not like this one. Except of course for those episodes with the flashbacks of Naruto’s parents which I adored. I loved how his mother has the same mannerisms and catchphrases.
I didn’t hate this season as it has its fair share of solid, insightful flashbacks and some emotional moments with a couple of characters here and there. I also appreciate how everyone wants to save Naruto because they have to for the sake of the world and not just to save him because they love him or something similar like all that nonsense with Sasuke who’s surprisingly sidelined throughout this season.
Naruto and Killer Bee got some solid, fun episodes, but those still felt like unnecessary, silly filler to me. As for the war itself, it just started owing to very prolonged build-up which contained some fine political conversations and situations, but it was otherwise mostly way too long and that build-up got on my nerves eventually.
But what is the worst offence of this season is their decision to bring back or “re-animate” all of the older powerful characters and especially villains to fight in this impending war. I absolutely despised that choice as it felt beyond lazy to me that they would even consider it, let alone do it.
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That led to those emotional moments which should be emotional, but aren’t as they are way too manipulative to be truly moving plus we’ve seen all of this before and the flashbacks themselves are becoming very unnecessary, but are at least shorter this time around.
In the end, I could certainly see how those who haven’t seen the original Naruto show would find this fun as it brings back characters whom they don’t know, but for anyone else including me this felt incredibly lazy, tired, boring and gimmick-like in its zombie turn of events. And I appreciate one on one fights instead of all-our wars, that’s simply me.
Worst Episodes: Sai and Shin and Golden Bonds.
Best Episodes: Target: Nine Tails and The Fourth Hokage’s Death Match.
