Also, the fighters have many, many more unique traits and abilities than Dragonball Z's. Characters tend to stick to their own styles fairly rigidly (with the exception of, say, Sasuke and Naruto adapting Rock Lee's taijutsu-based techniques, which was something they hadn't specialized in at all previously), which makes fights a lot more interesting - every time a new matchup occurs, the fighting is wildly different.
That's actually the big difference from DBZ for me because it means the nature of the fighting isn't so resting on a single variable. With DBZ, it didn't matter how smart or how efficient you were so much as how much raw power you had. Something that wasn't totally true with the original Dragonball. Don't even get me started on the utter farce that was DBGT... that whole series was basically about contriving ways for Goku and Goku alone to gain absurdly huge quantities of pure strength.
YYH made a valiant attempt at trying to put some character development into the same otherwise one-dimensional "power" construct of DBZ, but the very idea is something of a losing battle.
Naruto at least isn't totally one-dimensional. A > B and B > C does not guarantee A > C. While it still has some totally useless characters (e.g. Tenten), most everybody has the off-chance of surprising you.
True but I still think it isnt a very good serie. If you want a good enjoyable anime I still think there are alot better choices. Also the fact that it has a shitload of fillers (imo even worse than powering up to fill time) ruins it for me.
Well, I don't think anybody is about to tell you that Naruto is superior to say, Deathnote or Kanon... But part of the attraction is that chances are that you can continue to look forward to an episode 2 or 3 seasons from now and it will still be as worth it as it was before (filler block notwithstanding). Yeah, there's a huge load of fillers, but minus the 2 years during which the production team needed fillers to buy time for the manga to move forward, the fillers strewn in the middle of actual story were relatively minimal, and most of them came during the borders between seasons and/or when the show changed airing times. Well, that's not really a defense, but the point was more that most all the fillers worth complaining about were really one contiguous block, the vast majority of which the average fan wouldn't really be bothered to watch. The fact that we're getting back on track now is the big point of rejoicing.
I suppose if they'd done something like what Tsubasa Chronicle did where the show would just go off the air at the end of a season when the anime was catching up to the manga, you might have less to complain about, but I think the show has too much popularity both in TV and in game for them to be able to afford doing that.
What bugs me most is that having read the manga, I don't get the impression that the story has moved far enough along yet to account for a whole lot of anime episodes. When you look at how much content is in each manga chapter, especially those with a lot of action, there's not many minutes of animation in each -- maybe the ones with a lot of chattering and politics can fill up more, but still nothing massive, so I kind of see it only really filling up one season of Shippuuden and not a whole lot more before we see maybe Kakashi Gaiden (which isn't really a filler) and then some fillers again.
