Having defeated the Akatsuki member Kakuzu with his new jutsu, the Rasen Shuriken, Naruto discovers the moves worrying downside. In order to learn a less dangerous technique Naruto trains with Jiraiya to perform a move combining his abilities with one of his summoned frogs. Meanwhile Orochimaru is beginning to move once more and Kakashi is assigned to lead a team to discover his hideout but come up against a ninja with a powerful and unique technique.
With the exception of the first episode, this volume is made up of filler. Having said that, this filler arc is definitely interesting enough to be considered one of the better filler arcs the series has had in the past. Some of the characters introduced in this arc are interesting, with some good abilities and are some are surprisingly well developed for filler characters (I especially liked the relationship between Guren and Yuukimaru, and how it developed through the arc). The animation is reasonably good for filler and the English dub is as good as it always is.
There are only a couple of real problems I have with the episodes in this volume. The first is that the tone tends to shift from being relatively serious to some slapstick comedy rather jarringly sometimes. The other is that some of the fight scenes are a little lacklustre for the series and I hope that the rest of the arc has some better action.
Overall I feel that the twelve episodes in this volume were entertaining, much better than some of the other filler the show has had, and I would give it around four and a half stars.