Quote Originally Posted by Rater202 View Post
I think that if you think that nothing has happened in Boruto in 80 chapters that you're not being fair.
This discussion made me curious, so I went to see how far I made it into the Boruto anime before I tapped out. That turned out to be 138 episodes, right at the conclusion of the time travel arc. Which...honestly, wasn't all that bad. But it was still 138 episodes with no sign of speeding up, and that's only if you ignore the 720 episodes of Naruto it took to get to the start line of Boruto.

Looking at the episode list for Boruto, I see 293 episodes. That's 70 episodes longer than Naruto Part 1, and that's including the infamous 100 episodes of filler. Comparing to My Hero Academia, that show has had 6 seasons and is currently sitting at...138 episodes.

I swear to God I did not pull that number from MHA and use it for how much Boruto I watched. It just happens to be a crazy cool coincidence.

But it does highlight the disconnect between the Boruto anime and how other Shonen Jump manga are being adapted (with the obvious exception of One Piece). 293 episodes is an absurd number of episodes to cover 80 chapters of manga, and that's entirely down to them doing the old fashioned way of grinding out episodes on the weekly for 5 freaking years. After a bit of Googling, it appears that those 138 episodes don't even cover the first 15 chapters of the manga, with the Vessel arc beginning over 40 episodes later!

My Hero Academia's anime started two years before Boruto's anime, yet sits at less than half the episodes. And the difference is that it's almost all good stuff. There's a few blatant recap episodes and a handful of filler episodes, but the bulk of it is meat and potatoes main story.

The more remarkable anime for comparison purposes is the Bleach revival. After what I had read about the Thousand Year Blood War in the manga, it didn't sound all that remarkable. Another villain with another army, ho-hum. The manga's popularity sinking enough Tite Kubo had to hurriedly finish it didn't help. I started watching the anime to give it my usual "couple of episodes" treatment. The production values immediately blew me away, and the speed at which the plot moved was also staggering. As a long-time watcher of the anime it was clear what had been taken out - all the fillery repeated fight sequences and unfunny comedy bits had been excised to make a lean, fast-paced story that doesn't stop to smell the roses. I'm absolutely loving it, and they're going to blow through 4 years worth of manga (around 200 chapters I think) in a slim 57 episodes.

It just works, and it shows what you can do if you just wait for the damn manga to finish. Or at least pace out your seasons (like MHA does) so you're not frantically writing hundreds of episodes of filler waiting for the author to give you new content.

I realize this isn't relevant to the manga, but it is pretty damn frustrating to me as an anime viewer. I really like Naruto and Boruto when it gets its crap together, but there's just SO much random stuff thrown in.