Highlights
- The first fight between Naruto and Sasuke in Part I is superior to their final confrontation due to its emotional weight, impact on the narrative, and significant build-up.
- The Sasuke Recovery Mission highlighted the desperate struggles and intense battles faced by the young shinobi, increasing the stakes and setting the stage for the final battle.
- The first fight showcased the inner conflict of Sasuke and the bond between Naruto and Sasuke, while the final battle lacked the same depth and uncertainty in the outcome.
The ever present rivalry between Naruto Uzumaki and Sasuke Uchiha is one of the main narrative threads that runs through both Part I and Part II of Naruto, and each of the story's two halves culminates in a fiery battle between them at the Valley of the End. Apart from providing an avenue for the tension between them to escalate, both battles also serve the role of showing how far the duo have come over the course of their journey.
In fact, the second fight between them after the Fourth Shinobi World War is a conflict of such gargantuan proportions, that their attacks lay waste to the landscape and utterly destroyed the statues of Hashirama and Madara at the valley's barrier. However, despite its smaller scale and relative lack of flashiness, there are several reasons why the first real fight between Naruto and Sasuke at the end of Part I, is superior to their final confrontation. This is due to factors such as the lead-up to the battle itself, the emotional weight it carried, and its eventual impact on the narrative, which cumulatively added to its significance in the story of Naruto as a whole.
The Build Up Of The Emotional Narrative
From the very moment of Sasuke's introduction, he was built up as a rival to Naruto, even as they fought together on missions as part of Team 7. From the Land of Waves, to the Chunin Exams, followed by the Konoha Crush, Naruto and Sasuke underwent explosive growth as shinobi while the seeds of a friendship between them were sown. In the initial arcs of Part I, Naruto and Sasuke spend a fair amount of their time together, either on missions or during training.
It was only after the Chunin Exam Preliminaries, that their paths diverged, with Sasuke going off to train with Kakashi, as Naruto was guided by Jiraiya. After the Konoha Crush, they would once again go their separate ways, as Naruto left Konohagakure with Jiraiya to seek out Tsunade. This was a direct consequence of Hiruzen's death and Itachi and Kisame's attack on the village, which left both Sasuke and Kakashi in peril, after their minds were broken from being subjected to Tsukuyomi.
By the time Tsunade cured the pair and took up the mantle of the Fifth Hokage, Naruto had made impressive progress as a shinobi by mastering the Rasengan. Seeing his rival's growth in the time that he had spent incapacitated, Sasuke felt that he was falling behind for the first time in his life, and grew jealous, which nearly led to an all-out fight breaking out on the rooftop of the Konoha Hospital. In fact, the now iconic frame of the two water tanks pierced by the Chidori and Rasengan is emblematic of how Naruto had caught up with Sasuke, which was the final straw for the latter to take matters into his own hands.
On the advice of the Sound Four, Sasuke chose to leave the village and seek out greater power by training with Orochimaru. This triggered the start of the Sasuke Recovery Mission, where a cohort of young Konohagakure shinobi including Neji Hyuga, Choji Akimichi, Shikamaru Nara, Kiba Inuzuka, and Rock Lee, accompanied Naruto in a bid to bring Sasuke back to the village. Before setting out, Naruto also made a promise to Sakura to bring Sasuke back, which added to the stakes of the already tense situation.
Breaking The Only Bond He Had Left
As the troop of young shinobi set out, they had to fight intense, life-or-death battles against the Sound Four, where they were forced to push past their limits for the first time in their lives. Unlike earlier arcs where the chance of characters dying appeared minimal, the battles in the Sasuke Recovery Mission were desperate struggles where survival was not guaranteed and several members of the main cast were left in near death states.
This build up to the final battle of the arc between Naruto and Sasuke, heightened the stakes to an extreme, as the real cost of bringing Sasuke back to the village was laid bare for the audience to see. A similar build up is absent from the final battle between Naruto and Sasuke, where the latter's revolution seems almost like a plot contrivance to set up the fight, rather than a natural direction for his character to move towards.
Before the fight actually begins, Naruto attempted to reason with Sasuke, and inquire about whether his choice to abandon his former comrades was worth the power he so desperately coveted. Naruto's plea fell on deaf ears, as Sasuke stood firm in his decision. Having seen the power of Itachi's Mangekyo Sharingan firsthand, Sasuke had considered killing Naruto for the purpose of acquiring a similar degree of power, as Itachi had noted that the death of a loved one was the ideal trigger for this ability. Naruto was the main candidate here, since Sasuke viewed him as the only real friend he ever had, and he sought to destroy the final bond standing in his way.
When the fight began in earnest, Sasuke constantly looked back on their time together to determine whether they were actually friends, or if they really did share a bond of sorts, which fed into his hesitation to go through with killing Naruto. Although he believed that he needed to eliminate all the bonds he had gained in order to attain power, he was still held back by something, and this would be a major plot point at the fight's conclusion. This inner conflict, which paralleled the actual battle of ideals between the pair, is relatively absent or not as prominent in the final fight.
A Promise That Could Not Be Kept
One major difference between the first and last battles, is the degree of uncertainty hovering over Naruto and Sasuke's fates. In the first fight, it was anybody's guess as to who would emerge victorious, and the actual outcome of the confrontation has been the subject of divisive debates in the years since it was revealed. By the time of their final battle, it was all but assured that Naruto would come out on top, both due to the immeasurable amount of power he had obtained, and the need to finally conclude Sasuke's character arc. At that point, it was just a matter of how far the fight would escalate rather than any doubt about the result of their battle.
For anime viewers, the second fight may have a greater sense of spectacle and detail, but by that point, the scale of ninjutsu involved had reached a level where it was easy for an observer to distance themselves from what was going on. Instead, the more intense hand-to-hand combat of the first fight, coupled with its gradual escalation and subtle flashes of ninjutsu and transformations, is a much better study in pacing and expanding the scope of a battle. Moreover, many of the key elements of the first fight were expanded upon in the second one, illustrating how it laid the groundwork for many subsequent battles in Naruto.
The result of the last clash between the duo before the time skip, also perfectly illustrated their individual characters. When challenged by Sasuke to scratch his forehead protector, Naruto's pettiness came out at the very last moment, when he held back on his attack and left his mark across Sasuke's headband, just to prove a point to him instead of going for the kill as he could have. Simultaneously, Sasuke did not finish off Naruto even when the latter lay helpless before him, as he changed his mind at the last moment and chose not to heed Itachi's words.
Last but not least, the aftermath of this climactic showdown set up a lot of crucial plot threads for Part II, and also fed into the series' symbolism. Sasuke's scratched forehead protector became an emblem of his friendship with Naruto, and his choice to spare him and attain power through different means, led him to grow immeasurably strong during the time skip. For Naruto, this item was a reminder of how he failed to keep his promise to Sakura, and his own growth during Part II accelerated partly due to his desire to catch up with Sasuke and bring him back to the village. Hence, the sheer volume of plot points riding on it, coupled with the threads it would set up for the future, along with the emotional narrative, stakes, and incredible fight choreography, single this fight out as arguably the best in the series.
Naruto is available to stream on Prime Video.
