I approve of those two akatsuki duo. They are definately serious and dangerous and look, it took them only 2 chapters to kill the 2nd jinchuuriki. Kakuzu looks a little bit like Kisame only dangerous while Hidan reminds me of Aber from Death Note. I think these guys show more of an impression than Sasori, Diedara , Itachi and Kisame. We still have to watch how Zetsu and Tobi fight along with the leader >.>. Looks like Orochimaru and Sasuke aren't the only ones who are heading to leaf villiage.

Btw, Does Kakuzu belong to Lightning villiage? ^^;

You know, im also noticing a few problems with the manga. Character backgrounds...

Hidan is from a new village (NOT FROM MIST because he has 3 comma-like symbols on his headband) and Kakuzu from Hidden Waterfall. And yes, I also approve of them, but Deidara made a bigger impression, really. He immediately had a good fight with Gaara. These two new people are just more threatening, because they are basically doing Itachi and Kisame's dirty work and they have no problems with it.

I forgot about that Diedara-Gaara fight lol. But yeah, why the hell was the 2nd tailed fighter weak? And did you notice Hidan's ability? It looks like he can regenerate his body unless I got that part wrong. Kakuzu looks a deadly assassin that wont mind killing at all. That chick is dead right? cause if she is, they wont be able to extract that power from her o.o.

Who knows if she's dead or not? Unless those two members have special abilities to maintain the beast so it can get extracted later. We still don't know much about them, but so far, their personalities and interaction is already better than Itachi/Kisame.

I'm sure she's dead... Same thing happened to Gara and has it not been for Team Kakashi and the grandma... No more Sand dude!

Remember what kaph said, in order for them to obtain the power, she has to be alive. I mean yeah.. It looks as though she will be dead..But something's gotta give with her..

Gaara was still alive when he was captured by Akatsuki. Remember the life-to death moments he had when his beast was extracted by Akatsuki? He died after that.

I have to agree with some of the posts, the two tailed person was rather weak considering she went all crazy cat and then like 5 pages later she was pinned to a wall by mister religious. Hopefully that's not the end of her because I was really interested in the idea of adding her as a new, even if temporary, character. Hopefully it won't turn into every chapter a jinchuuriki gets killed and they move on with some master plan. Well I think Akatsuki is trying to get rid of them because they're a threat.

Alright Fans, Here's the deal

- Asuma is Sarutobi's son
- The Akatsuki Duo killed the Monk (who i thought would show some kind of DBZ-ish style of fighting).
- The Return of Zetsu-- The Nobody seeing that he hasn't shown his power yet (same with Tobi)
- Kakashi's explanation of the new Technique.

My only problem here is , ONCE AGAIN, the lack of character backgrounds. Why the hell is kishimoto waiting so long just to reveal something that could've been shot out in the episode/chapter where the funeral was held?

In some way, i can see that Asuma DOES look like Sarutobi. But other than that, what kind of moves does Asuma really have? Thats what im interested in. I still think of him as some kind of Segal-Norris-Van Dame'ish clone. He is very boring. Same goes with Kurenai.

As for the Monk, I was expecting more out of him but oh well.

Hidan looks like he lays too much on the PIFF lol. Constantly on the ground,etc.

That's all i can say about this chapter. I'll be glad if Kishimoto makes a new arc about CHARACTER BACKGROUNDS though I think that could've been done between Kakashi Gaiden and the Akatsuki arc =/.

YES, Sasori took forever to die, but that's what made it so fucking cool. No matter what Sakura and Chiyo did, the dude had something else to fall back on. Sasori's supposed to be really strong and he didn't fail to demonstrate that, especially since the gap between levels was so high. Sakura was a good fighter and had a high-jounin (or beyond?) old lady helping her out, but they were still outclassed. My only worry is that by the time the characters fight the other members of Akatsuki, the heroes would have gotten strong enough to make the fights less dynamic. Hopefully Kishimoto will do something unexpected, though he's losing his touch.

Gaara versus Deidara was short, but nevertheless awesome. Seeing Gaara take control over an entire desert to attack one guy wasn't anything that I expected to see, especially so soon into the new arc.

I feel the same way... New characters but very little description about them... So far they've been hunting people but we don't even get see the action!

Things are slowing down

So nothing really happened but we learned how Naruto would learn his technique, and it'll be a wind type. I guess the shadow-clones were to be expected but I really thought the training would be sharingan related since Kishimoto loves it so much. Anyways, I hope this new technique isn't just a Rasengan/Chidori copy except it's wind, just anything besides that and it'd be good.