Naruto: How Many Episodes Are There (& 9 Other Questions You ...

Naruto is one of the most popular anime of the last 20 years, and even after ending in 2017, fans still feel very attached to the series. It’s no surprise given Naruto's persistent popularity and regard in the anime community, that people new to anime, or even anime fans that just never got around to watching this particular series, are still interested in it.

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The potential to pick up a new anime, especially a shonen anime which often have a lot of episodes, can leave people with a lot of questions about the series, especially when it comes to a franchise as lengthy as Naruto.

10 How Many Episodes Are There?

As mentioned above, Naruto is not a short anime. Like many shonen anime, it’s based on a long-running and popular manga, which means there’s a lot of story to cover. Since the manga was running at the same time as the anime, there are times when the story caught up to the manga. In an effort to keep from overtaking it, anime-only storylines were added, making the series even longer. The original series has 220 episodes while Shippuden has 500, for a total of 720.

9 Is There A Time Jump?

Along with having very long runs, shonen anime also regularly make use of time jumps, or time skips. This makes sense for series like Naruto, One Piece, or Bleach, where the characters are fairly young at the start. In order to age the characters up and to avoid more tedious, less vital storylines, the series skips some time. In Naruto’s case, there’s a three-year time jump, bringing the main characters from 12 to 15 years old.

8 What Is Naruto About?

This is probably the most common and absolutely understandable question that a fan might have about Naruto. The easy answer is that it’s about a group of middle school-aged kids who are in school training to become ninjas. Naruto, the main character, is an outcast and orphan who is not accepted by the rest of the village because of the Nine-Tailed Fox that was sealed inside of his body when he was a baby. His goal is to prove everyone wrong about him and become the leader of the village.

7 Can You Watch Shippuden Without Watching Naruto?

The short answer to this question is no. Shippuden is actually the second part of Naruto. While someone could watch it without watching the original series, they’d miss a lot of the context as well as the relationship development between the characters.

6 What Is The World-Building Like?

What’s really impressive about Naruto is the extraordinary amount of world-building that goes into creating the story and the mythology of the ninja villages & clans. The story takes place in a fictional world in which there are several villages that exist solely to train ninjas.

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They are sometimes at odds with each other but are more often allies. The use of ninjutsu and the history of the clans in the villages are all very carefully spelled out and considered, with each element affecting the story in different ways.

5 What Are The Best Fights?

For some people, a series like Naruto is less about the characters or the plot and more about how exciting it is to watch the various fight scenes. The animation and different strategies & levels of violence can be just as satisfying as the story.

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While it’s difficult to discuss specific fights without spoiling the story, there are some epic rivalries, like that between Naruto and Sasuke or Neji and Hinata that lead to incredible standoffs in the anime.

4 How Closely Does It Follow The Manga?

It’s difficult to perfectly adapt a manga into an anime, since the mediums are so different in regards to storytelling. There can also be more or less room to work with in one medium or the other, depending on the number of chapters and the length & amount of episodes. Naruto does closely follow the main story of the manga, but there are some small differences. The use of filler arcs is the biggest difference. The anime also uses the female characters to a greater degree than the manga.

3 How Does Boruto Relate To Naruto?

Naruto has a sequel story in the anime Boruto: Naruto Next Generations. Boruto follows the children of a lot of the main characters of the original Naruto series. It takes place a couple decades after the end of Shippuden so there is a lot of catching up to do with some of fans’ favorite characters and seeing who ends up married to who.

2 How Many Episodes Are Filler?

For people thinking about hopping onto Naruto for the first time, 720 episodes can be an incredibly intimidating number. That’s a lot of time spent on anything, but especially an anime and doubly so when there are so many other, shorter series out there. So it’s good to know that not every episode is vital to watch. 299 episodes are filler, meaning they don’t need to be watched to fully understand the story. That’s a little less than half, which takes some of the pressure off.

1 Do Characters Die?

As Naruto is about a group of characters training to be ninjas, there is quite a lot of violence. Since the series geared toward a younger audience, a lot of that violence is subtle or suggested, but there are multiple on-screen deaths. Early on, a lot of those deaths are for short-term characters and villains that viewers haven’t spent a lot of time with. But as the stakes ramp up as the story moves on, there are definitely some surprising character deaths.

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