Started off pretty good, but dragged on far too long to the point where the writer was not only running out of ideas but blatantly contradicting his original ones. Also had more than its fair share of crappy filler.

Oh Naruto. Never has a show captivated me with a premise, given me some interesting characters, and then led me on a long, winding road to nowhere with tons of filler without meaningfully addressing the cliffhanger threads in any satisfying way. A great example of a good show gone bad.

Not as good as Naruto Shippûden, there were a TON of fillers, I still think, despite that, this is actually one of the finest anime, also for its time during the early and mid 2000s, it really is/was an actual good anime.

12 eps

Seen up to episode 99.

Skip the filler episode, and you've got a great anime for kids.

Before they got into the filler arcs, this show was still pretty good.

The world-building is great, the cast is rich and vibrant and the pacing is acceptable. There's certainly a marked decrease in quality as it goes on but I sincerely like everything up until around the Pain arc, and I think the backlash is quite unjustified. Of course I'm pretending the filler doesn't exist, because why would you ever watch the filler. Just google a watchlist that excludes it for fuck's sake.

Ninjas are supposed to be cool

This is all that needs to be said about this series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZy9Q07qCYQ