Death Note

A death god drops a notebook in the path of genius student Light Yagami. Upon picking it up, he discovers instructions that whoevers name is written within will die. Despite initial disbelief, Light decides that using the Death Note, he will purge the world of criminals, writing the names of those who appear on the news. Soon enough, the media has named this mysterious force Kira, and parts of the population has grown to support and revere it. Opposing Kira is L, a world renown reclusive detective who has taken a special interest in solving this case.

Writer Tsugumi Ohba and Artist Takeshi Obata also teamed up to create Bakuman, another very good series but not one I've followed all the way to the end yet, and Obata also drew the manga adaptation for Hiroshi Sakurazaka's All You Need Is Kill, otherwise known by the name of it's hollywood remake The Edge of Tomorrow.

Naruto

Naruto is over. When you end a manga after 15 years, there will always be fans who like the ending and fans who hate it. These are the thoughts of a reader who stopped paying heed to Naruto approximately 6 years ago coming back for the final 5 chapters, as such, it won't be particularly in-depth, and any attempts at recapping the story up to that point are likely to be hilariously wrong and exaggerated.

I said goodbye to Naruto during the Pain fight in Konoha all those years ago. I stopped reading around then because, like with Bleach, I grew tired of sitting idly by as an extremely tired story continued to be squeezed of all it's originality. As a younger man, I was adamant in not wanting my favourite shows to end. I wanted things to continue forever just like Dragon Ball Z felt like it had done. Then there came a time where I realised the importance of the conclusion. Continually repeating the same tropes and overextending a story ruins franchises. Now I adamantly believe the best shows are those who have known when to end a good thing at it's peak before a concept grows stale.

Even Kaguya thinks this series has gone on long enough.

Naruto was a gateway show for a lot of people of a certain generation who enjoy anime today. It was often never the first people see, but the show that made people aware that there was a whole world of anime and manga out there. Around 2003, I was amongst the rush of youngsters eating up the early episodes of the anime, though I stand by that the only part of Naruto that stands up to this day is the Zabusa arc. I digress, after the first few episodes of Shippuuden, I grew fatigued from the lackluster story and decided to just read the manga instead. It would only be so long before I realised how little I enjoyed spending 10 minutes a week reading Naruto that I decided I should give that up too. Off the top of my head, I believe this was around the time Nagato had blown up Konoha and I realised how little I cared about the whole deal.

Going on from there, I retained a small but still real sense of investment into at least knowing the backbone of what happened from there. I would ask a friend of mine who continued to read to tell me the gist of things. I know vaguely about Obito being Tobi after all (shocker, I know), Danzo being donezo,  and the sage of the six paths' mommy being revealed as the big bad guy.