“Boruto: Naruto Next Generations” ran for 293 episodes on TV Tokyo, from April 5, 2017 to March 26, 2023. That is a long life for a sequel, and a stranger one than its episode count suggests. The show is a spin-off and a sequel to “Naruto” (2002–2007) and “Naruto: Shippuden” (2007–2017), based on the manga by Ukyō Kodachi and Mikio Ikemoto and supervised by Masashi Kishimoto. It was produced by Pierrot. A second part was announced to be in development.
Trailer, via vizmedia.
Boruto Uzumaki Enters the Ninja Academy
The premise is plain. Many years after the Fourth Great Ninja War, the village of Konoha is thriving under the Seventh Hokage, Naruto Uzumaki. He is married to Hinata Hyuga and has two children, Boruto and Himawari. Boruto feels resentful over his father’s absence due to his duties. Hoping to gain Naruto’s approval, he enters Konoha’s Ninja Academy. Upon graduating, he forms a ninja team as a Genin alongside Sarada Uchiha and Mitsuki, led by their Jōnin teacher and Naruto’s protégé, Konohamaru Sarutobi.
That is the engine: a boy who wants his father’s attention from a man who gave the village all of his. It is a smaller story than “Naruto” ever attempted, and for a while that works in its favor.
The voice cast carries it. Yuko Sanpei voices Uzumaki Boruto, Cocoro Kikuchi voices Uchiha Sarada, and Ryuichi Kijima voices Mitsuki. Three leads, three distinct registers, and the show leans on all of them.
Momoshiki, Karma, and the Ōtsutsuki Threat
Then the plot expands, and expands again. Sarada’s father Sasuke warns Naruto of an impending threat connected to Kaguya Ōtsutsuki’s bloodline. Kaguya’s successors Momoshiki and Kinshiki Ōtsutsuki abduct Naruto to use Kurama, the Nine-Tailed Fox sealed within him, to revitalize the dying Divine Tree from their dimension. Boruto, Sasuke, and the four Kage, leaders of other ninja villages, manage to save Naruto and fight together to defeat the Ōtsutsuki.
Before dying, Momoshiki places a mark on Boruto called “Karma.” That single act resets the series. Boruto and the others soon learn about a group called “Kara” searching for people who possess Karma marks. Boruto’s team meets a boy named Kawaki, a fugitive from Kara who also has Karma. Naruto adopts him into the family and tries to protect him from Kara.
This is where the show gets good, and where it gets crowded. Sasuke discovers that all Karma users will be taken over by the Ōtsutsuki clan, and that list is not limited to the villains. It includes Jigen, who runs Kara, and it includes Boruto. At the same time, Kara starts to come apart from inside. Koji Kashin, a clone of Naruto’s late master Jiraiya, moves against Jigen. Another Kara member, Amado, explains that Jigen has been possessed by Isshiki Ōtsutsuki since Kaguya betrayed him millennia ago, when the two came to Earth.
Amado’s account also covers the mechanic itself: Karma lets the Ōtsutsuki come back through the body of whoever carries it. Isshiki goes looking for Kawaki. That is a lot of machinery turning at once, and the show mostly keeps the gears meshed.
A Prequel That Had to Catch Up
One structural fact matters more than any fight. Unlike the manga, which began as a retelling of “Boruto: Naruto the Movie” (2015), the anime begins as a prequel set before Boruto and his friends become ninjas in a later story arc. The anime had to build a runway the manga never needed. That decision explains the pacing of the early stretch and the whiplash of the later one.
The run itself is simple to lay out. The series opened on TV Tokyo in April 2017 and closed there in March 2023, 293 episodes later. It moved from the Academy years and the formation of Boruto’s Genin team into the Momoshiki arc, where Karma first appears, then into Kara and Kawaki and Naruto’s household, and finally into Amado’s revelations, Isshiki, and the mutiny inside Kara.
| Period | What aired |
|---|---|
| April 2017 – March 2023 | 293 episodes on TV Tokyo |
That is not a schedule of quality. It is a map of a show that kept adding load-bearing walls while people were living inside it.
What the Karma Mechanic Actually Does
The Karma mark is the best idea in “Boruto: Naruto Next Generations.” It is not a power-up. It is a countdown. Every user of it is a future vessel, and the show is honest about that: the rule Sasuke uncovers applies to Boruto himself, not just to the villains.
That is a real stake, and it is the reason the Kara material lands harder than the earlier Academy episodes. When Naruto adopts Kawaki into the family, the show is doing something the original series rarely attempted: putting the Hokage’s domestic life directly in the path of the plot. Naruto’s absence was Boruto’s grievance from the start. By the Kawaki arc, Naruto’s presence is the thing being threatened.
The Jiraiya connection is the other strong swing. Koji Kashin being a clone of Naruto’s late master is the kind of legacy move that could read as cheap. It mostly does not, because the show treats it as a problem rather than a tribute.
Where the 293 Episodes Sit
The published audience score for “Boruto: Naruto Next Generations” is 7.8/10, from 2,522 votes on TMDB. That number is fair, and it is fair for a specific reason: the show’s highs are genuinely high and its lows are long.
The 293-episode order is the real story here. A sequel to a franchise that began with “Naruto” in 2002 had to serve two audiences at once — viewers who grew up on Naruto and viewers who never watched a frame of it — and the prequel structure was the compromise. It bought the anime room to establish Boruto, Sarada, and Mitsuki as their own team before the manga’s material arrived. It also meant years of episodes that existed to fill space.
The cast holds through all of it. Sanpei’s Boruto carries the resentment without making it tiresome. Kikuchi’s Sarada reads to this paper as the steadiest presence in the show, and Kijima’s Mitsuki gets the strangest material and, to our ear, plays it straight, which is correct.
What the show gets right, it gets right because it refuses to let Boruto be Naruto. The son does not want the throne. He wants the man. Every Karma revelation, every Kara operation, every Ōtsutsuki resurrection scheme is ultimately pressure applied to that one unresolved thing.
What it gets wrong is proportion. The Divine Tree, the four Kage, the millennia-old betrayal by Kaguya, the mutiny inside Kara — the show stacks mythology until individual episodes stop carrying weight on their own. A viewer dropping in at episode 200 is lost in a way a viewer dropping into “Naruto” never was.
The announced second part is the part worth watching. Six years of runway is built. The Karma clock is set. Kawaki is in the house. If the next chapter spends what this one saved, the 7.8 will look like a floor rather than a ceiling.
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