Naruto's Ending, Explained

Naruto ends at chapter 700, published in 2014, with an epilogue set years after the war the last arc is spent fighting. The ending most people describe is not quite the ending on the page, and the difference is the interesting part.

How the last fight ends

Naruto and Sasuke fight at the Valley of the End, where Hashirama and Madara fought before them, which is the series putting its thesis about repetition somewhere you cannot miss it. The fight closes on a Rasengan against a Chidori, and both of them lose an arm.

Neither wins in the way the word usually means. They end lying in the rubble of the statues of their own predecessors, unable to stand, bleeding from matching wounds. Sakura heals them both. Then the two of them undo the Infinite Tsukuyomi together and release everyone Madara had put to sleep.

The argument settles it, not the punch

Flat on his back and out of chakra, Sasuke asks Naruto what he actually means by friendship. Naruto's answer is that seeing Sasuke in pain causes him pain. That is the line the fight turns on, and it is why the series is not really a story about power levels: the last confrontation of a 700-chapter shonen manga is resolved by one character conceding an argument.

Sasuke's turn works because it is not forgiveness being handed to him. He arrives at it himself, having lost.

The part the manga leaves out

Naruto becomes the Seventh Hokage between chapters 699 and 700, and the manga does not show it. The single event the entire series points at, from the first chapter onward, happens in a gap between two pages.

The closest the franchise comes is a 2016 anime short, "The Day Naruto Became Hokage", in which Naruto misses his own inauguration ceremony. Leaving the scene out is defensible: the series had already made its case, and an inauguration is a ceremony rather than a resolution. It is still odd that the image the whole project was built toward is the one the ending skips, and readers who feel the last chapter is thin are usually reacting to exactly this rather than to the time skip.

What the epilogue shows

Chapter 700 jumps years ahead and checks in on the cast as parents, with their children heading into the academy and Naruto running the village he spent his childhood being thrown out of. It reads less as a conclusion than as a handover, which is what it turned out to be.

For the order to watch it in, see the Naruto watch order, and the filler list for the episodes to skip on the way. Naruto's own lines are on his quote page.