Did Naruto fall off after the Pain Arc?

Naruto shouldn’t have ended at the Pain ark, but Shippuden should have ended there or at the very least at the end of the kage summit. With the War ark being its own series. This would have given the audience a break and kishimoto time to flush out some ideas.

Everything is trash is too harsh, but it is undeniable that the quality fluctuates much more after the Pain arc.

Nagato wasn't the strongest villain, but he was a villain that most people living in Third World countries could sympathize with the most.

The biggest problem after pain arc was the really annoying overuse of powerful abilities. The rinnegan was such a cool and interesting dojutsu that brought some new into the story. What happens after the pain arc? „Oh yeah that eye did not even belong to him and every second idiot will have one from now on.“

And don’t even get me started of the sharingan that simply kept adding abilities like controlling dimensions, time and literally life and death like a cheat code. Not everything was bad after the pain arc but the writing truly got terrible

I admit I can't clearly remember most things that happened after the Pain Arc.
But I distinctly remember feeling like the Authors went like: "Fuck it. Let's throw more sharringan bullshit out there and be done with it."

After the pain arc, the story feels like epilogue. Just additional story to prolong the story without real purpose.

Edit: Some comments made me realize why. It's because Naruto got the recognition that he wished for his entire life. The true reason why he wanted to become hokage.

What ruined it was Madara was the originator of the renegan, rather than nagato being a special being. One of the greatest "villains" in all of anime, tho.

While he yelled it all the time, becoming Hokage was never Naruto's true goal to me. He was always lonely, sad and weak but after the pain arc, all of those things were gone. He was loved, happy and one of the strongest shinobi. Why continue the story after that?

I feel like his dream to become Hokage was purely because of how they were loved, influential and strong and he got exactly all that. Maybe Hokage was the friends he made along the way😂

Naruto died when everything, including the "rinnegan prophecy"started being related to Madara.
It undermined Nagato's relationship with Jiraiya and his leadership of Akatsuki, reducing him to non special fodder character instead of profoundly written contrast to Naruto

Honestly pain was just too good a villain..his philosophy, his ideals, everything he did. He feels like a true final villain for Naruto himself. He stopped Naruto talk no jutsu,  he killed both his teachers, destroyed the village. It was crazy. In comparison obito and madara doesn't feel nearly as personal to Naruto himself

6:33 I thought the start of kage summit was actually a filler lol

The issue is that the world of Naruto was set up to be complex. Pain had a legit issue with large nations just trampling smaller ones. Pain had set up a situation where smaller nations might unite and fight the larger ones (or he just does it on their behalf) and Naruto doesn't even have an answer of how to deal with hate.

Then later all the difficulty of dealing with hate is made easy by giving us inhuman Zetzus and aliens to fight. It's real easy to to come together if the whole world is going to be invaded by aliens.

The overall downfall started after the Pain arc, but the 5 kage summit was great too. The war arc shat all over not just Part 1's setups and storyline but even the major storylines from Shippuden lmao.

11:45
Thing is about power creep, the nine tails destruction before any retcons was suppose to be unique to it. Because it’s a demon. A natural disaster with malice.
The 4th Hokage, the pinnacle of individual Shinobi power even died sealing it.

No one human was meant to surpass a tailed beast except maybe a rinnegan user, which is the literal God’s eye.

But I get what you are saying since it fits with the retcons

I finished rewatching naruto with my sisters today and now i can say that for me shippuden should have ended in the pain arc and continued the rest of the story after a time skip in wich the characters aged to "the last" period.

The Pain arc was peak, a bunch of stuff after was bad, but you can't end the series after the Pain arc and there are things that are not trash. But by god, there is so much trash.

the problem with everything after the war arc is not the power creep, but how much bullshit with no foreshadowing or explanation happens.
izanami - random bullshit, izanagi - total bullshit, orochimaru being revived - random bullshit, random mask that can undo the reaper's death seal - random bullshit, sasuke surviving way too much because obito bails him out - garbage, sasuke's convictions - absolute garbage, total immunity to ninjutsu - garbage, sage of six paths randomly deciding to appear and give his powers - random bullshit, kaguya - worst bullshit ever, obito deciding to give kakashi sharingan after death - random bullshit, naruto vs sasuke - completely pointless fight, obito not dying despite having ten-tails extracted and using rinne tensei - absolute bullshit

then obito's existence and "master plan" ruins everything, turns out it was him who did the massacre together with itachi because now itachi is too weak, turns out it was him who told pain everything, turns out it was him who did nine-tails attack, turns out it was him who made the mist village into "bloody mist", being able to just put mizukage under total genjutsu. oh and nagato isn't actually a cool character with rinnegan, it was all master plan. It cheapens out all of these story points with "uh it's just sharingan bro it's all planned,  zetsu predicted that madara will predict that obito will predict that nagato will play nicely with them and follow their plan, and that none of all the things that could've ruined it will not happen"

madara's plan makes no sense, literally all konan had to do to ruin it was to destroy the rinnegan and it's over, or nagato could just not die, or nagato could just never become pain, or obito learned the truth about kakashi actually not being the one to kill rin sooner, or obito dies attacking minato, or itachi just does anything and isn't executing his completely fucking stupid plan to be killed by sasuke and instead actually saves the world

all of these things were revealed post the worst fight in naruto verse (sasuke vs itachi) and the story went extremely downhill from that point onwards

Akatsuki and Pain were the reason i watched Naruto Shippuden.
After Pain was defeated, i watched it, but didnt have as much interest as before.

There are numerous reasons why Naruto after the Pain Arc dropped in quality, but what people don't realize is that Pain Arc itself is one of those reasons. It primarily has to do with Sasuke, because his character motif after Itachi's death entirely hinges on "destroying the hidden leaf". Now this plot point first got teased by Itachi when he mentioned to Naruto about the possibility of Sasuke attacking the leaf and how he would react if such a scenario occurred. Now, when you tease something in your story and don't materialize it, it's ok, because teasing itself does not give said plot point material ground to build on. However, after Sasuke himself declares about his intention to attack the leaf, this becomes no longer teasing, but the build up of said plot point becomes complete, ready to be carried on. In fact, this event is exactly what had been passively building up throughout the Sasuke's character arc, the Itachi plot twist merely put it into action. So now that you have build this whole character arc for Sasuke, but then use a different character in his stead, namely Pain, to carry out his mission, while this decision proved to be good for Naruto's development, it also left Sasuke hanging.
Now, this in itself is not entirely detrimental to the story, but now there arises a need to shift Sasuke's long term focus towards something else, and this is where the real issue comes. Even until deep in the war arc, Sasuke keeps talking about destroying the leaf, which in all reality is him beating a dead horse, because destroying the leaf is anymore a dead plot line. Sasuke now is a purposeless character, who has no role in the war, completely left on the sidelines by Obito, until he accidentally meets his brother's corpse, who chews his food for him, then he magically meets the Hokages who chew his food for him, and out of the blue he decides that he's gonna be Hokage now, which is a very forced attempt to create some material stakes between Naruto and Sasuke for their final clash. It's this transitional phase of Sasuke's late development that was so poorly constructed and so shallow in execution that it makes me wanna puke.
After this of course all the reincarnation BS further diminishes the value of the journey our main characters had walked, and opens a whole new can of worms which further eat into the remnants of the dying plot. The poorly utilized Edo Tensei, the Kaguya the Zetsu, etc. etc. etc...I just don't want to get into all of it, there's so much bad in the war arc that one could write a whole book about it named "How not to finish a story". However it all starts with Sasuke.
That said, Kishi's vision for this whole thing was good, but the execution got worse and worse the more it went. Remember a rule about writing stories, "it's the experiences that give meaning to words". This rule was a strength of early Naruto, but became a weakness in late Naruto.