Boruto Episode 60

Boruto Episode 60

Introduction

This week’s episode of Boruto was titled “The Hidden Leaf vs. The Hidden Sand” and covered the last two matches of the chunin exam semifinals. The first match was between Sarada and Araya, while the second match was between Mitsuki and Shinki.

After this episode, I think Mitsuki may be my favorite member of the new Team 7. Boruto is obviously the worst of the three, and Sarada’s still good, but Mitsuki is definitely the most interesting of the three characters.

Summary

Sarada and Araya’s fight came first, and so wasn’t the main match of the episode. This was clear to see just from the quality of animation for the fight. Compared to Mistuki and Shinki’s match, the first fight of the episode was like watching a side-show.

However, looking past the animation quality, it Sarada’s fight wasn’t really that good regardless. We saw Sarada attempt to use her Sharingan, but nothing came of it. She failed to find an opening in her opponent’s movements and also failed to use genjutsu.

Further, the mystery of Araya’s jutsu was solved and it ended up making him a worse character than when we knew nothing about him. It turns out he’s a puppet master, much like Kankuro from Naruto was, however, Araya uses a puppet of himself to fight, basically like a clone.

My first problem with this is that Araya is just a downgraded version of Kankuro. You could make the argument that Shinki is just a copy of Gaara too, but at least he’s not a straight up downgraded version of him. Yodo, their teammate, has a new jutsu, but she’s still lame like Araya.

Kankuro was a cool character who used a variety of puppets, but Araya just uses one puppet that looks like himself (at least we only see him use this one puppet) and it turns out he’s anything but cool. The reason he uses puppets is because he gets stage fright much like Metal Lee.

Way to ruin a mysterious character who could have had some cool backstory.

While watching this fight, and before his jutsu and true nature was revealed, I thought that Araya may have been blind and wore a mask to hide this fact. It made sense to me since he wasn’t affected by Sarada’s genjutsu, and didn’t react to surprise attacks like someone normally would.

With this in mind, I figured he might actually be a sensory-type ninja who could detect his enemy’s movements and whereabouts as long as they were within a certain radius. Unfortunately, I was wrong and he’s much lamer than I could have ever guessed.

Also, Sarada won as I predicted last week.

The second fight of the episode between Mitsuki and Shinki was the important match. Would Mitsuki come out on top and make an all Leaf finals, or would Shinki win and cause Boruto and Sarada to team up against him?

Spoiler: Shinki won, but not in an outright fight. As I predicted last week, Mitsuki ended up forfeiting the match, but not due to the reason I expected. While I thought Mitsuki would forfeit the match after gathering information on his opponent for his parent, Orochimaru, this wasn’t the case.

Mitsuki actually forfeited because he was backed into a corner by Shinki and would have had to rely on his sage mode to continue the fight. That’s right, it was revealed that Mitsuki knows sage jutsu (probably Snake sage jutsu).

Further, the reason he forfeited rather than relying on his sage jutsu was because he decided Orochimaru wouldn’t want him to reveal this ability just yet. So, instead of forfeiting after gathering information on his opponent, he forfeited in order to stop his opponent from gathering information.

Decisions like this one are a big part of why I think Mitsuki is one of the most interesting characters in the Boruto series.

Mitsuki using his Snake Lightning jutsu against Shinki (from the anime Boruto: Naruto Next Generations)
Mitsuki using his Snake Lightning jutsu

Next Episode

My predictions about the outcomes of the matches this week ended up being correct, but what does this mean for next episode? According to the preview, we will end up seeing Boruto and Sarada team up against Shinki in the final round, but will we actually see the conclusion?

The farther we go into the chunin exam tournament, the less I feel like the next arc with Kinshiki and Momoshiki is going to start out with them attacking the chunin exams like they did in the Boruto movie. If it’s going to happen it has to be either next episode, or the following.

Also, keep in mind that Boruto was disqualified from the chunin exams for cheating with his Scientific Ninja Tool in the movie, but this hasn’t happened yet in the series. That means both this and the attack by the Ōtsutsuki clan must happen during this final match.

With all this in mind, I don’t feel like we’ll be seeing the end of the chunin exam tournament. My prediction is that Boruto will do something to get disqualified mid-match, then when Naruto is in the arena stopping him, the attack will occur.

If there was no cheating, and the match were to finish, I think Shinki would come out victorious over Boruto and Sarada even when they’re working together. By losing the fight, this gives them both something to work towards in the short-term.

Conclusion

Before I end for the day I want to comment on a few things this episode reminded me of. First of all, we see both Sarada and Mitsuki use lightning style jutsu. When I saw the lightning style jutsu used this episode, it reminded me that I hate the color change of lightning for the Boruto series.

Lightning style jutsu has always been primarily blue/white in the Naruto franchise (as well as many other anime), but the change to yellow lightning just makes me think of Pikachu using thunderbolt from Pokémon. It just looks more childish and I can’t take it as seriously.

Sure, when Mitsuki uses his Snake Lightning jutsu, it still looks cool, but for most of the other jutsu it just looks bad. It seems this time around they decided to save the blue/white color scheme for Chidori rather than all lightning style jutsu.

While it’s not an artistic direction I agree with, I do think that in the original Naruto series Kakashi mentioned something about Chidori being unique in its blue color. So I suppose you could make an argument that this artistic choice follows the original intent more closely.

The next thing this episode reminded me of is that all these kids are experts at using chakra natures despite not even being chunin. At almost their primes, Naruto could only use wind style and Sasuke could use fire and lightning styles.

Boruto is able to use a variety of styles such as water, lightning, and wind (I think those are his chakra natures) which means he’s already more skilled than many jōnin if we’re to believe what was said in the Shippūden series. Three chakra natures is not the norm.

Mitsuki, on the other hand seems to also be able to use three natures in lightning, wind, and earth. Sarada appears to only know lightning and fire like her father, but she’s an Uchiha, so multiple natures seems standard for her age unlike the other two members of her team.

I think it’ll be interesting to see how this dynamic works later on in the series. In the original Team 7, there were no overlapping chakra natures or jutsu specialties, so each member had a distinct role. This time around, however, there is plenty of crossover between abilities.

It’s also mentioned that Boruto’s affinity is for lightning style, not wind like Naruto’s. With this in mind, and based off most of the jutsu he uses, I think Mitsuki’s affinity is wind. Finally, I’ll assume that Sarada’s affinity is fire simply due to her clan.

The final thing I want to mention is related to this crossover of abilities on the new Team 7. Mitsuki clearly specializes in snake jutsu, which makes sense since his parent is Orochimaru, a snake sage jutsu user.

However, since Boruto is going to be the student of Sasuke, does that mean Boruto will end up with a snake summon instead of Mitsuki? Will they both summon snakes? Will Boruto summon Hawks also like Sasuke or Toads like Naruto? This will be interesting to see in the future.

My review of the next episode is available here.

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