The Naruto series gets alot of bad rep for how it went, especially after the time-skip/pain arc. I however find some people to honestly weigh too heavily on those faults.The debacle after the pain arc isn't really all that bad, especially when read from start to finish. There were some moments that were terrible and there were others that were fantastic.
The story is half decent, though it does have some minor bumps and hiccups that hurt the late game arcs, and over all it really does send a fairly positive message to the readers. I would have given this a 9, but after the war arc it just didn't seem right.
The art is pretty good though it starts to suffer sometime around the war. When kishi works however, he works, and I have too give him cred for his art when he does.
The weakness of Naruto is most present in its characters, which suffer various fates after the time skip. Many characters got thrown to the curb after the time skip, and slowly seemed to disappear. One of the biggest complaints of the war arc is that it didn't properly use its other characters. If you were not the main characters or the villain you were getting almost no screemtime. I never really cared much for the other rookies, so this didn't bother me as much as others.The villains after pain are also pretty annoying. Obito is a 5 villain, Madara is a 7 villain and she who must not be named is a 2. However, when Kishi does use other characters then team 7 and creates good villains, they do some great stuff.
I enjoyed this series greatly and find some of the reviews on here to be a little brash and uncaring, only focusing on negative aspects of the series.This is why I wanted to share my own opinion. Though this story has many cliche shounen characteristics, it honestly doesn't ruin the story all that much, what really hurts the show is the characters and the nasty late game story arcs. I would have given this a 6 in all honesty if the series had ended at chapter 690, but it gets in 7 for a great ending(at least for me.)
All in all, Naruto is a good series that has some wasted potential, some great shit and some poor to fantastic characters. I would really recommend it, but if you don't like the time skip, then you should stop there or cut to the last chapter.