One-hundred-and-thirty-some episodes is an awful lot of buildup, but the fight actually comes pretty close to justifying all the hype. Rock Lee's brief transformation into the Drunken Master provides some comic relief at a point where the show badly needs it – that's a scene the animators obviously had some fun with.Īll this builds up to the big final showdown between Naruto and Sasuke, who doesn't actually feel like he needs to be rescued at this point.
That's not a knock on Nara and company as characters, but they've held on to the spotlight for a while at this point, and generally speaking the tone of this arc is pretty consistently grim. The surviving members of the crew have some genuinely bizarre abilities, and our heroes have to come up with equally inventive ways of defeating them.Ī few guest stars show up to provide a timely assist, too, which injects a little fresh blood into the storyline at an opportune moment. It helps that the Sound Four are a pretty interesting collection of adversaries. Some of the flashbacks and origin stories we probably still could have done without, but the spotlight never stays trained on one character for so long that they wear out their welcome. There's less time spent waiting for things to happen than there was in some of the last season's confrontations.
