I think the premise of this story is cool and i enjoyed reading it! As a comment, I think you are a great writer and i want to challenge you in a future novel to really get the creative juices flowing. What i saw in the novel was basically kishimoto’s naruto plus one AU. Not really enough change to show that this work was unique. To be clear, you made quite a few changes but you never really explored the impact of them. Haku/zabuza lived what happened to them? Naruto had a friend growing up what really changed? Sasuke had a rival growing up, what changed? Sakura went to med nin training what happened to her? How did this 5yr old kid get access to high level seal knowledge without the hokage knowing? I think if you spent more time filling in the holes and less time focusing on canon plot, it could be game changing. One way to get yourself to focus on that would be to stop writing in canon timeline, choose a different period. Could be interesting. So for the above reasons, you get a 3 star in story development , 5 for everything else since its basically kishimoto naruto
Liked by 14 people
LIKE