The Ending of Naruto Shippuden Explained: What Happened, and What It Meant
This covers the ending of the series.
What happened, in order
Kaguya is sealed by Team 7 working together, which resolves both the war and the Infinite Tsukuyomi that had trapped most of the world. The tailed beasts are freed, closing out a thread that started in the very first episode, and it’s a beat that gets skipped in a lot of recaps despite mattering enormously.
Naruto and Sasuke fight at the Valley of the End, adapted across Shippuden episodes 476 through 479 and manga chapters 694 through 698, in a battle that ends in a mutual knockout: both of them lose an arm and are left unable to move. Sasuke concedes, not because he’s been beaten outright, but because he finally understands what Naruto’s been trying to tell him the entire series.
Sasuke is forgiven and leaves the village to travel and atone. Kakashi becomes the Sixth Hokage. Then the manga makes a large jump, roughly fifteen years forward, straight to the epilogue.
Worth knowing if you’ve only watched the anime: its final stretch includes adapted side material and filler alongside the core story, so the shape of the anime’s ending and the manga’s ending aren’t laid out identically, which is a real source of confusion for people comparing notes across formats.
The epilogue: where everyone ended up
| Character(s) | Status |
|---|---|
| Naruto | Hokage, married to Hinata, with children Boruto and Himawari |
| Sasuke & Sakura | Together, with daughter Sarada; Sasuke is mostly away from the village |
| Shikamaru & Temari | Together, with son Shikadai |
| Ino & Sai | Together, with son Inojin |
| Choji & Karui | Together, with daughter Chocho |
What it actually meant
The Indra and Asura cycle finally breaks. Every previous reincarnation of that ancient conflict, going all the way back, ended with one side killing the other. Naruto and Sasuke are the first pair to actually stop short of that. That’s the real resolution of the series’ oldest running thread, and it’s the piece a lot of recaps miss entirely while focused on the fight itself.
Talking, not winning, was always the method. Across the whole series, Naruto’s actual technique for dealing with enemies has been reaching them rather than simply defeating them: Nagato, Obito, Gaara, Neji, Kurama, and finally Sasuke. The ending is that same method finally working on its hardest possible case.
Freeing the tailed beasts closes the jinchuriki thread that opened all the way back in the very first episode, when Naruto himself was introduced as an outcast because of what he carried.
Why the mutual draw is the actual ending, not a cop-out
This choice is worth defending directly, since some readers come away from the final fight wanting a cleaner winner. A decisive victory for either side would have undercut the exact theme the series had been building for hundreds of chapters. If Naruto beats Sasuke, the story reduces to good triumphing over bad through superior strength, which flattens everything the series had spent building about Sasuke’s grief and how understandable, if ultimately wrong, his path had been. If Sasuke wins, the ending validates the idea that vengeance and isolation were the right answer all along.
Neither of those readings fits what the rest of the story had established. A draw, followed by Sasuke choosing to stop rather than being forced to, keeps the resolution about connection rather than domination, which is consistent with how Naruto resolves essentially every other major conflict across the entire series.
What it left open, honestly
A few things worth being upfront about rather than glossing over. Sasuke faces essentially no direct consequences for his actions across the series, which a real number of readers find genuinely unresolved. Several of the epilogue’s pairings arrive with very little on-page development behind them, which is the most common specific criticism of chapter 700. And the fifteen-year jump skips over the entire period in which most of these characters’ actual adult lives happened.
Some of that gap does get addressed elsewhere. The Last: Naruto the Movie covers the Naruto and Hinata relationship specifically, and Boruto picks up the story well past the epilogue, filling in some of what the manga itself skipped. Worth knowing where to look if the jump left you with questions the main manga doesn’t answer.
What the final chapter’s framing signals
The last chapter is worth reading for structure as much as content, because of where it chooses to place its attention.
It does not close on Naruto. It closes on the next generation heading to the academy, with the adults visible mostly as parents rather than as the ninja the story spent seven hundred chapters following. That framing tells you plainly that the series considers its own story finished and the interesting questions to now belong to other people.
How the ending set up everything that came after
Note how directly this ending sets the stage for the sequel series, since a lot of what defines Boruto traces straight back to choices made in these final chapters. Sasuke’s wandering exile, framed here as atonement, becomes the reason he’s absent for large stretches of his daughter Sarada’s childhood. Naruto’s position as Hokage, secured in this epilogue, becomes the very thing that isolates him from his own son Boruto later on.
Even the freed tailed beasts don’t disappear from the story, since their absence and Naruto’s eventual loss of Kurama become central plot points in the sequel. The ending isn’t a clean stopping point so much as a hinge, closing one set of threads while quietly opening the ones Boruto spends its entire run pulling on.
Common questions
How does Naruto Shippuden end?
Kaguya is sealed by Team 7 working together, the tailed beasts are freed, and Naruto and Sasuke fight a final battle at the Valley of the End that ends in a mutual knockout with both losing an arm. Sasuke concedes, is forgiven, and the manga then jumps roughly fifteen years to an epilogue.
Do Naruto and Sasuke die at the end?
No. Both survive their final fight. It ends in a draw with both left unable to continue rather than with either one killed.
Why did the final fight end in a draw?
Because a decisive winner would have undercut the theme the series spent hundreds of chapters building. The Indra and Asura cycle had always ended with one side killing the other, and Naruto and Sasuke are the first pair to stop short of that.
What does the epilogue show?
Naruto as Hokage, married to Hinata with Boruto and Himawari; Sasuke and Sakura with their daughter Sarada; Shikamaru and Temari with Shikadai; Ino and Sai with Inojin; and Choji and Karui with Chocho.
