Kakashi and Guy get their fight on, past and present.

What They Say:
Kakashi races to the scene where the Seven Ninja Swordsmen Kushimaru Kuriarare and Jinpachi Munashi were last sighted. Enraged by the carnage they’ve left behind, Kakashi teams up with Might Guy.

The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With some time focused on Tsunade and her background with the Raikage out of the way, Naruto: Shippuden shifts its focus to… Kakashi. Certainly not Naruto! With the battles we’ve seen so far, there’s been some decent fights and some troubling fights, particularly because of the use of the reanimated people that were once on the same side as the Allied Shinobi Forces, which makes for some really problematic battles. When you have to fight against a former teammate, master or someone you respected and looked up to, it can certainly hamper what you’re doing. And because the characters were already dead, it does give the show an out in how they’re dealt with since they’re easier to “kill” in a sense while the bad guys are still not really gutting any of the living characters.

With the fight here, we get a team-up once again between Kakashi and Guy as they continue to advance and see what’s been going on with some of the advance teams. One in particular has left them coming across members of the Seven Ninja Swordsmen who are pretty powerful, which makes sense to put the two highly competent main characters that are adults into th emix. Kakashi’s role has been good in the war so far and Guy is in the right place overall to make his position work. Giving them a chance to fight once again with the bad guys, Kushimaru and Jinpachi, lets them flex and show off a bit with intensity rather than the usual holding back we often get from them.

While we get a decent battle in the present, we also get a flashback fight from when Kakashi and Guy were younger, but not quite Naruto young, at least from the first series .The two of them have lighter voices which is amusing to listen to and the fight is alright as it plays out, with them dealing with some interesting foes such as the Stone Shinobi, but it’s the kind of flashback that’s used to just draw out the episode overall. It has its impact in the present to be sure, no doubt about that since it gives us another look at Kakashi’s strengths, but by and large it is just one of those padding elements that the series uses far too often.

In Summary:
If you like Kakashi and Guy and the kind of relationship they have when it comes to fighting and working with each other, you’ll like this episode. We get two different sets of fights, one in the present and one in the past, but it’s all just padding for the larger war here with a side story. It’s not one that takes us hugely out of the way or anything, and I do like expanding on the war overall, but it just continues to minimize the war overall for me since we’re not seeing all that much of it. It’s too micromanaged in a way and there isn’t any real sense of pressure ore tension to it. It’s certainly not as bad as some other padded episodes, but that it had to do yet another flashback to try and give it some relevance just leaves me yawning.

Grade: C

Streamed By: Crunchyroll

Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.