It sucks. Really, I meant it, it sucks. Naruto is by far the most over-the-top manga I ever read, it's the best example of how to stretch a 12-volume plot into something the author dragged for years like a dead body up a hill.

The first thing that might annoy you on Naruto is the lack of character design, we have Naruto, the lame protagonist that has incredible powers, Sasuke, the bland tough-looking friend of the protagonist and Sakura, the girl.

I wish I could say more about the characters but there's nothing to say, on exactly 700 chapters they never change, it kinda baffles me this fact because there's no character development, if you read the first chapter, then you know what these 3 will be doing on the rest of the manga, not only these 3, but everybody. As it has absolutely no character development, I can't say the author knew what he was doing and it's enough to say "hey, I think this manga is worth nothing" but there's still bad things to say about it.

The silly plot. As having the worst characters ever, the plot isn't good either, it's a neverending road to do only one thing: save Sasuke, and this is something really weird considering Sasuke is a cold-blooded murderer which certainly has Naruto and Sakura into a stockholm syndrome of some kind because it makes no sense. There were wars, ancient evils, threats to the whole world, and what's the focus here? Save a bastard. Nice one author, you almost made me believe that the whole thing had a point.

After all what this manga tries to do and fails so hard? It has a point or at least tries to. I think the author tried to show us that the bad guys only need compassion and this could be something good, could have teached us how to be better people maybe, but instead we only had 700 bloody chapters of pointless fights.

Just to point out how inconsistent things are: ninja rankings mean nothing at all, Naruto was the most powerful genin ever, nice one creating gimmicks to expose more of the universe inside the manga and simply forgetting about it right after. Kekkei genkai becomes meaningless as pretty much everybody has one and as it's so common, why people don't have multiple kekkei genkai abilities? Wasn't it supposed to be genetic? In the whole world people marry their cousins or something? It begs for an answer.

Bottom line: this was wrote for kids and kids only, it's bland, undeveloped, has plot holes and the deus ex machina happens all the time, not only on the protagonist which is the only one with an excuse to summon the deus ex machina, but with everybody.

Some people seemed a little confused with "deus ex machina" so I'll care to explain, it basically a synonym to lazy writing, when you think all hopes are lost, Naruto will die (or any of the "good guys") and simply everything is going wrong, the author calls the deus ex machina and all problems are solved. How is deus ex machina in Naruto? Kyuubi. After Naruto discovering this bloody fox inside of him, there was absolutely nothing to worry about because as long as he can just call the fox, he can win anything, and look how convenient, the fox has 9 tails to be unlocked, so as the difficulty of battles increase, he can always get stronger! How clever!

One last disclaimer: I used to like Naruto, when I was 10.