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Summary: Boruto has so far been a poor followup to Naruto. The art is low quality and inconsistent and the action lacks flow and power. The story is rushed and contradictory and seems to be forgoing everything good about Naruto in favor of elevating powerlevels even more.

Following up on a story that focused on the maturation of it's characters is always hard, especially when it's one as successful as Naruto. That said, so far Boruto seems to do virtually everything that others stories that tried doing this and failed have done in the past.

I'm gonna begin by talking about the art though, because that's something ... a lot of people have trouble with and isn't really related to the rest of my complaints. I don't actually have a problem with Kishimoto's decision to hand the reigns over to a new artist, in fact I kinda like it given that it both fits thematically with the work and it allows him to work on that new sci-fi thing he talked about in 2015. The problem is that I don't think the art is really good enough.

One of the big issues I think a lot of people have with Ikemoto's art is the characters. He uses much softer looking, more rounded lines which ends up giving all his characters a more feminine look. Now admittedly this was something that Kishimoto actually said he was bad at doing himself so it's possible that the girls suddenly looking like they're from a completely different manga was done on his instruction but in my eyes some of the design changes just go too far and overall don't look very good.

That problem is compounded by the halfhearted attempt to match the style of the original. The reason I say "halfhearted" is because sometimes Ikemoto just plain old doesn't try to draw the character the same way as normal. This is most noticable with Boruto, because sometimes his hair will suddenly get a lot shorter and curly just like the female characters, but frankly the art is just inconsistent all throughout. If Ikemoto was just going to do the manga in his own style then fine, I don't like it that much but I'll accept it, but just stick to one style! Honestly I find it rather shocking that someone who has been working on this series for over 15 years has seemingly regressed in his ability to match Kishimoto's style. If you read back through the series you can find some background characters that match the style of Boruto, but they still look closer to the original series than a lot of what we have now. Also, he seems to by trying to keep the original style more with the men while just doing his own thing almost all the time with the women, which just makes it even more jarring.

The final problem I have with the art is the action sequences. I mean, overall the art in the series is pretty mediocre but the action sequences are the worst. At around page 32 of chapter 3 (page number might change depending on how you read it) you can see a clear example. You see Lee's kid in a really awkward pose fighting a poorly shaded enemy. If you look at his hair and pose it seems like he's lunging forward and down. Only the lower half of his leg has any speed lines and they seem to be implying that his leg is going straight up. Also his foot is missing. In the next panel you see that he's completed a roundhouse kick that doesn't really match the direction his leg was coming from at all, the speedlines are still only on the lower half of his leg despite his whole leg moving (they also look really weird and I'm not sure what kind of motion they're meant to show), and he's jumped in the air for some reason despite not really having been in any position to do that. The biggest sin though is how the enemy is just flying away from him with NO indication that he actually kicked him. If you're going to have a fight that consists of a single hit, not actually showing that hit is just awful, especially considering how much Kishimoto used showing the moment of impact to great effect. There are plenty of other instances of awkward poses that don't have any impact and just plain old look weird, so I'm not gonna bother pointing them all out, but I would recommend checking out 5/12, just because Sakura's pose is so stupid it's honestly hilarious.

I do want to criticize one major problem with the fight sequences specifically though, and that's the speed lines. They're worthless, and this is weird because apparently one of Ikemoto's jobs was adding white to the speedlines, so how he managed to do that for over a decade without noticing how Kishimoto used them is a complete mystery to me. Kishimoto's speedlines were excellent. They gave a sense of power and speed to his action sequences, but more than that they tied the flow of the actions together. Just look back at Lee Vs. Garaa. You can see exactly where Lee has been in the trail he leaves behind. You can see how badly he's been hit by the intensity and length of them. That is completely lacking in Boruto, and I think Ikemoto's failure to use speedlines properly is one of the major contributors to this. He draws them far to short, makes awkward angles with perspective, and rarely seems to consider how the rest of the body is moving aside from whatever limb is the focus of the movement. Because of this, it often just looks like characters are teleporting around the battlefield trading awkward blows that do no damage. It just lacks any sense of continuity, power, or speed.

Now I'm not just here to bash Boruto so I want to point out something that I feel he's done fairly well with the art, and that's the shading. Naruto has always been a very well shaded series. Kishimoto eschewed overusing screentones and preferred to do the majority of his shading by hand, which is one of the things that gives Naruto it's distinctive, sometimes downright grimy look. Ikemoto has continued this, and while I do think it's not quite as good as it used to be it still looks good and is a refreshing departure from how much screentone you see in other manga.

Now that I've gotten the artwork out of the way, onto the story.

To begin with, I'm just not even gonna talk about the opening. Yes, it is the main character narrating over a suspenseful scene, only to tell you that the story starts a while back and you need to learn more to get up to this point and jumping back into the past to actually begin the story. There is just so much I could say about that that I'm not even gonna bother touching it. Who knows, maybe down the line we'll find out that Kodachi actually had some brilliant reason for doing that. Speaking of which, why on earth was he even picked for this? If I was picking a writer for the followup to one of the most popular manga since DBZ I wouldn't go with a guy who wrote part of the script for a few anime that honestly weren't that amazing. He's never even worked on a manga before for goodness sakes!

Anyways, the story has been super underwhelming so far. Despite being called "Next Generation" the enemies they fight start up exactly where Naruto left off. Yup that's right, it's taken less chapters than the number of YEARS Naruto was in print for fight scenes against overpowered, mysterious god enemies who control the power of the final boss of the series to start happening. And yes, that remains true even if you account for the fact that Boruto's chapters are twice as long as Naruto's.

Don't forget your jutsus though! Naturally, a generation of children who grew up in peacetime are able to use techniques their parents trained years for with no problems. No, having their techniques be slightly smaller than their parents doesn't make things better. Choji had to take drugs and almost kill himself to do partial expansion yet somehow his daughter can do it effortlessly while younger than him? One of the best parts of the original series was how it showed the characters growth. There were entire arcs dedicated to characters training to learn moves, which worked so well with the series themes of growth. In this though? Characters can learn techniques which took multiple arcs to learn in the length of a single chapter. This is incredibly infuriating because a major theme of this new series appears to be that the characters have to learn not to take shortcuts and learn techniques with their own power, but apparently Kodachi doesn't actually want to bother writing training arcs so he just gives characters powers after a few pages with some implied training.

I also want to point out that he chooses Konohamaru to introduce and recommend the shortcut to training in the first place, as well as him doing some of the miracle montage training. While not something that's necessarily wrong plotwise I just think it shows how deep some of the problems with the writing go when the character who represented the idea that "there are no shortcuts to hard work" is recommending a shortcut to hard work in the story and being used as one by the author.

The final complaint I have is sort of a followup to the previous issue. So far, a great many things that got their own, sometimes very long, arcs in the original series have been skimmed over in a couple of pages, I think mainly to speed up the appearance of super powered DBZ fight scenes against literal gods. I know I said I wasn't going to talk about this but seriously, the series is so impatient to show off that characters are gonna have super high powerlevels that it wastes the first pages to show you the MC fighting Notsuke over the rubble of Konoha. It's like the series is in a mad dash to quickly distance itself form everything good about the original in favor of raising the powerlevel even higher.

Just stop. The characters literally defeated god. Recently we've had successful series like Boku no Hero or Assasination Classroom that show that people still love stories about the process of learning instead of just wanting to see how OP the main character can get next. We even have One Punch Man which is purely devoted to making fun of outrageous powerlevel escalation. I know Naruto got full of overpowered nonsense toward the end but honestly that was the weakest part of the whole series for me. Boruto feels like a completely wasted chance to restart with what made the series so popular to being with.