Boruto Episode 58

Boruto Episode 58

Introduction

For a couple of weeks now I’ve been doing a weekly review of the new episodes from the anime which started airing this season every Sunday. While enough time hasn’t passed yet to see how popular those posts really are, I’ve decided to try a similar strategy with new Boruto episodes.

For the foreseeable future, every Friday we’ll be taking a look at the newest Boruto episode, starting this week with episode 58: The Tournament Begins! While this isn’t the case this week, some of these posts may be shorter than usual due to them only covering one episode’s worth of content.

Summary

This week the final stage of the chunin exams begins. The first stage was a true/false question which weeded out the teams who accepted defeat. The second stage was capture the flag between two teams, and the third stage is a one on one fight.

There are four teams of three who made it to this final stage, which means there are 12 ninja in this tournament. There are two teams from the Leaf, one from the Sand, one from the Cloud, and no teams from the Stone or Mist villages.

Since everything before this stage was team-based, only full teams have made it into the tournament stage. This was also true of the first chunin exams in the Naruto series, but due to a high number of ninja making it to stage three, there was a preliminary round which knocked out a few competitors.

This year it seems not enough ninja made it into the final round to necessitate a preliminary round of the tournament.

Chunin Exam stage three competitors from the anime series Boruto: Naruto Next Generations
Chunin Exam Stage Three Competitors

The first team from the Leaf is Boruto, Sarada, and Mitsuki. The second team from the Leaf is Shikadai, Inojin, and Chocho. The team from the Sand is Shinki, Yodo, and Araya. The team from the Cloud is Yurui, Tarui, and Toroi.

Taking a look at the bracket, there really wasn’t much randomization even though teams aren’t supposed to matter at this stage. Every member of the first team from the Leaf faced someone from the Cloud, and every member from the second Leaf team faced someone from the Sand.

The first round of this tournament has six fights, but this week we only got to see the first five. We saw Boruto vs. Yurui, Shikadai vs. Todo, Sarada vs. Tarui, Inojin vs. Araya, and Mitsuki vs. Toroi.

In the first battle, Boruto beats Yurui and his bubblegum jutsu by relying on his scientific ninja tool just like he did in the second stage. Although this wasn’t a good fight, I don’t like Yurui’s jutsu so I didn’t care much.

The second fight between Shikadai and Todo was a bit more interesting. Todo uses sound jutsu (too bad the Hidden Sound Village isn’t around anymore). However, Shikadai uses sound back against her and is able to win the match.

Fight three between Sarada and Tarui was probably the most entertaining of the episode because Sarada declares she’ll win in three seconds, and then proceeds to do so by landing a single, devastating punch. We don’t know Tarui’s jutsu, but visually she looks like one of the Sound ninja from Naruto.

The fourth fight between Inojin and Araya didn’t tell us anything about Araya’s jutsu, but he ended up winning without even needing to use it. While I don’t like Todo and her use of Apple-brand headphones, Araya seems like he’ll be a genuinely cool character.

Mitsuki vs. Toroi was the final fight of the episode and left us with some interesting knowledge. Toroi is able to use electricity to speed up his muscles and move faster despite his size. In order to combat this, Mitsuki starts using an unknown jutsu which appears to have a large amount of chakra.

Before actually using this jutsu, however, he remembers that he isn’t supposed to use it yet and so instead uses his snakes to dispatch his opponent. It will be interesting to see what that jutsu is in the future.

Next Episode

In the next episode we’ll get the final fight of round one between Chocho and Shinki. I don’t really think Chocho stands any chance against Shinki so that should be a fairly quick match.

While we don’t yet know the details of Shinki’s jutsu, his sand jacket appears to be made of metal sand which would mean he uses the same jutsu as the third Kazekage. While he’s Gaara’s adopted son, he could be the grandson of the third Kazekage, or some sort of experiment.

Next episode we’ll also get the first fight of round two which is between Boruto and Shikadai. This fight was already seen in the Boruto movie so I’ll spoil it here for you now. Boruto wins the fight by using his scientific ninja tool, and is then disqualified by Naruto.

I don’t remember if this means that Shikadai gets to move on to the next round or if it results in a double elimination. However, it doesn’t really matter because what we also know from the Boruto movie is that the chunin exams are interrupted much like in the Naruto series.

Looking at the bracket though, this is probably for the best.

After Boruto vs. Shikadai, I don’t remember seeing the next two fights in the Boruto movie, but maybe they happened there too. Fight two is between Sarada and Araya and should be a pretty good fight. Hopefully we’ll get to see Araya’s jutsu if this fight takes place.

The third and final fight of the second round then should be between Mitsuki and Shinki, assuming Shinki beats Chocho. This is probably where Mitsuki is supposed to use his secret jutsu that was hinted at in this episode.

So hopefully we get to finish out round two before the chunin exams are attacked (like they always are). However, if you look at the final round on the bracket, it’s a three-way fight.

I think part of the reason the bracket looks like this is because the writers knew that it didn’t matter since the chunin exams get interrupted anyway. They could have added one more team into the tournament to remedy this bracket flaw, but instead decided it didn’t matter.

Either way, next week we’ll probably only get the next two fights and have to wait another week to possibly see Sarada vs. Araya and Mitsuki vs. Shinki. Those fights seem important enough that they’ll happen before the exams get interrupted.

My review of the next episode is available here.

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