English Dub Review: Boruto “Sasuke’s Shadow”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)
Continuing from the last episode, Team 7 face the multi-headed White Zetsu within the mine. The monster shows its ability to use multiple elemental styles and soon has the team on the ropes with its massive size and frightening speed. With things looking desperate, Boruto uses the Scientific Ninja Tool Katasuke to blind it so Konohamaru can lay some damage. Wounded, it runs off, giving the team some time to breathe. Konohamaru explains about White Zetsu and Kaguya Otsutsuki, as well as battling them in the Fourth Great Ninja War (which he seems to think he took part in for some reason despite barely a Genin at the time?). As for where this White Zetsu came from, further exploration finds an incubator that has since run dry, meaning that this is the only one they’ll need to fight. Still, even just one is still quite the battle.

Boruto is still up for fighting it, but Konohamaru tells him that these are forces going back to the creation of all Ninja, so he, Sarada, and Mitsuki are all in way over their heads. He then goes to face it while they get away, but Sarada stops him, saying they need to work together in order to make sure White Zetsu doesn’t escape and hurt anyone else. With their combined efforts, they manage to weaken it, but Boruto gets cocky with the Ninja Tool and ends up pinned, forcing Konohamaru to save him with a giant Rasengan, completely vaporizing White Zetsu. They then find the remains of the incubator, with sacks of decomposed Zetsus and even come across another giant one, but see that the rest of the area has been lit up by Amaterasua, the black flames made by the Sharingan, specifically Sasuke’s. He’s been on a mission to find and destroy the remnants of the Otsutsuki, this place included.

Later, Konohamaru reports their findings to Naruto, even though Boruto and friends have to sit back because of the classified info. Seems there are other locations with similar Zetsu, meaning they were possibly put in place to fight a greater enemy. And in a post-credit scene, Sasuke encounters that enemy in a snowy valley: other members of the Ostsutsuki named Kinshiki and Momoshiki.

OUR TAKE

Boruto ends its run on Toonami for the foreseeable future with an actually not bad episode which thankfully resolves the battle from last time. Would have been pretty strange to cut the show off on a cliffhanger like that, but thankfully we at least got to see how that turned out. I also have to take back what I said about the battle not teaching the characters much, as it helps them to solidify their strategy as a team and setting up Boruto’s own shortcomings to be addressed in the next arc. I wish we had gotten a more interesting opponent with stronger ties to the old series to fight them and make that point OR that this came at some earlier point during the last 50 episodes, but this is certainly not the worst option they could have taken. We even get a new OP and ED to take us out, which is nice because we get to see the OP in full.

It also leads us right into the seconds before the start of the Boruto movie on which the next arc is adapting, which offers a good cutoff point for viewers who want to continue the story but have to wait until it either airs here or comes out on DVD. That’s pretty nice timing for letting the show go AND saves me over three months of finding new ways to say “just go watch the movie” because that really will save you viewers at home plenty of time than watching a recreation of it. Admittedly, it won’t be EXACTLY the same as the movie, with some things stretched out, some redesigns, and an extra antagonist to deal with who was cut from the film, but either version is going to have its pitfalls by virtue of relying on the Otsutsuki clan as villains. And I might as well say it here, they suck. Kaguya, Toneri from “The Last”, and especially these two are such disappointments that it makes you pray whatever movie comes next does not use them.

In fact, we actually got a reminder of the last movie that came out NOT using them in some capacity, as the Naruto Shippuden episode that aired alongside this was also a tie-in to the “Road to Ninja” movie. So, viewers can see this as an opportunity to check both of these films out, which while they aren’t especially good, are entertaining for fans of the franchise. It was always neat when the two shows coincidentally synchronized like that, which makes this a pleasant sendoff to the double ninja lineup that Toonami has enjoyed for the past year. I remember when Bleach only had fifty-ish episodes playing on Adult Swim in a loop, but they eventually bounced back and completed that run, so here’s hoping Boruto can make a swift return. And also that they don’t cut off Shippuden prematurely because that would REALLY suck.