Ah, Naruto games. One anime series that seems to generate some relatively good games on the console front(not so much on the Handhelds, except maybe on the PSP, but I didn’t try the Naruto games on it), and this game is no exception. Heck, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to call it the best console Naruto game.
It will probably not be the biggest game on the competitive scene of Naruto fighting games (Gekitou Ninja Taisen 4 is probably staying there for a while), but it’s definitely something Naruto fans will love.
Read on for more!
Story
Okay, not gonna dwell too much in the story here. If you’re reading this review, chances are you already know everything about it, and maybe more than I do(I stopped watching Shipudden at episode…46 i think, because the pacing was so horrible, and I don’t read the manga…yet).
This game “kinda” covers episodes 1 to 135, but it takes quite a few liberties and doesn’t explain much. In some battles you have to win using the losing character in the anime, some parts are skipped(a whole arc was skipped), and some characters just don’t appear at all.
People who don’t know the Naruto story will be a bit confused as to what’s happening, and fans will whine that some things aren’t happening as they should be.
Graphics
The graphics here are incredible. Never has a Naruto game looked that close to the anime. If you look quickly you could basically mistake this for the actual anime. The character models are all spot on, the animations are near flawless, the characters really move like they do in the anime. Really, playing this it really feels like it is the anime. I’ve been playing this on an SDTV, so I did notice some flaws(mostly to do with the outlines on character models), but playing it on HD probably takes care of those.
Overall i’d say this is easily the best looking Naruto game yet, and the best looking anime game on an HD console as of now.
Sounds
The game sounds, once again, just like the anime. Every sound, from kunai clashing to Naruto’s shadow clones exploding, everything is the same as in the anime. A big plus here is being able to set the japanese voices for the characters. No suffering from the “Believe it”s in the game and average english voices, the much better japanese voices are an option here and it’s awesome. Not much more to say here, everything sounds great.
Gameplay
There’s 2 modes here: Ultimate Mission Mode and Free Battle mode. Ultimate Mission mode makes you go through the Naruto story, and free battle you can fight against either the computer or a second player.
Ultimate Mission Mode
This mode makes you go through the story in Naruto. Basically you can run around town collecting stuff, find people giving missions, and when you’ve found everything (for now) you go in the mission list and do some missions. Simple enough. There are 5 kinds of missions: Tree Climbing, Tree Jumping, Town navigation(including hide-and-seek parts), “special missions” (playtime, objects broken, steps taken, bringing items to NPCs) and Fighting, but i’ll get to those later. There’s really not THAT much to do here. Sure, running on the roomtops and throwing naruto into the wall and such is pretty fun, but beyond that there’s really no exploration needed or anything, since everything you’ll ever need to find will be marked on the map.
Navigation itself can be a bit iffy. Not lots of air control. The Naruto Canon (Naruto making a kage bunshin to throw himself further) is a bit inaccurate, as sometimes it tells you the path is safe, but once in the air you’ll hit some things. The camera is awful. But overall it’s kinda fun to do at first.
So the Ultimate Mission mode is fun but nothing special. You go around talking to NPCs marked on the map, destroying objects for money and scrolls , and finding scrolls/treasure chests/ingredient bags.
This is also where you’ll unlock all the characters, jutsu, support justus and support characters. Jutsu are found in Treasure Chests, which appear after story missions most of the time, support characters appear as you unlock the characters, and support jutsus are bought from Iruka sensei(trade in a number of scrolls, get a support jutsu). There’s other unlockables such as music/dioramas/ultimate jutsu movies(useless >_>)/figurines, but they’re not really useful.
Mini-games
There are 2 mini-games here, which you’ll have to repeat multiple times through the game for missions.
The first mini-game is tree climbing. It requires only to use the left stick to move left and right on the tree, and that’s it. The goal is to get to the top before the time limit expires, and sometimes it’s a race against Sakura, Sasuke or both. On the way up the tree you’ll find 2 items: Speed boosts and scrolls. Scrolls give you either 1 teleport which will prevent you from hitting trees for a limited time, and if it’s a race you’ll also have a chance to get explosive tags on kunai and a specialty jutsu (in Naruto’s case, he throws shadow clones ahead) to slow down other opponents. Not a lot to say on this. It’s pretty fun, but sometimes it can get a bit annoying.
The other mini-game is tree jumping, In normal Naruto style you’ll find yourself jumping from branch to branch/tree to tree to either reach a destination or catch someone/something. The controls, once again, are simple. The left stick controls speed and horizontal movement… and that’s it. On the way you’ll have to evade other trees and touch speed boosts. If you hit a tree, you have a chance to not lose any speed by pressing a button, as displayed on the screen, before landing on the next branch. If the purpose is to catch someone or something, when you get close enough you’ll also be prompted to press a button displayed on the screen. This is pretty simple, but pretty fun, and it gets really hard later on.
Fighting
Ah now we’re at the good part. The fighting system in this game uses elements from previous Ultimate Ninja games, but gives it a third field of movement instead of sticking with a side-scrolling environment, and it works awesome. I’ve said this too much already and I’ll say it for the last time: Playing this makes you feel like you’re playing an actual battle in the anime.
Now that I’m done with that, let’s look at it a bit more. The controls are relatively simple. Circle does melee attacks, Square shoots projectiles, X jumps/dashes, triangle adds Chakra for the next attack/movement(if you press circle you’ll do a jutsu after pressing triangle once and an ultimate jutsu if you press triangle twice), R2/L2 guards or teleports if you have the proper timing and L1/R1 summons its respective support character. Simple, and various combinations do various actions.
You have dashes, jutsus, teleports and a bunch of other things. The combos are relatively simple, but if you try going a bit deeper you’ll start learning the timing for Kawarimis or when to unless your jutsus or ultimates. There’s also a good variety of items. Explosives, traps, tags that alter status, delayed shuriken, there’s lots of stuff and you can find original uses for all of those.
Supports are an important new element here. When their bar fills up, you can summon a support character to pull off a jutsu or combo(you can choose one of their attacks before battle starts). Those characters can break you out of enemy combos, or help you build up your own combo. They have various uses as well. Defense, attack, traps, altering status… kinda like items, but cooler.
The one thing to come back here is the ultimate jutsu. A big powerful attack that takes away a bit over 1 of the opponent’s 3 life bars. Really overpowered, and most of the time not that hard to pull off, all you have to do is figure out the proper timing so the opponent can’t block or evade it. When you land it, you have a power struggle with your opponent. You either have to taps a series of buttons, button mash one button, or spin a control stick. This all depends on what you set in the option menu. Getting a higher number(not sure how much) than the opponent will have one of two effects: If you’re the one doing it, the damage will go up, and if it was done to you you’ll evade the attack completely. What’s cool here is that if you evade it, the animation actually changes, differently to previous games where the animation just stopped.
Then you have Awakening, which exists to give an edge to a character who’s in trouble. After getting too much damage, you’ll be able to charge your chakra with Triangle, and holding it long enough will awaken your character. For some it’s a power boost for special and normal attacks, for others it completely changes the character (Naruto gets his one-tail Kyuubi mode, for example), giving new attacks, combos, jutsus and ultimates. Pretty cool stuff and it can help you out if you’re in trouble. But for the most part Awakenings only last a little while and after you power down, with effects depending on the character.
Last thing is the storm gauge. This gauge, next to your life bar, ignites as you do combos with lots of hits. When it fills up, your supports are powered up, your chakra refills automatically at a fast rate and your ultimate jutsu will do more damage. Fun.
What really makes the fighting great is the camera though. Some people might not like it, but it’s really dynamic, it never really prevents you from seeing everything, and it feels more anime-like than normal side-to-side fighting systems. No much more to say here.
Overall the fighting system is really fun. Not the deepest system in the Ultimate Ninja series, but easily the funnest of the bunch.
The bad stuff
With all games come bad choices, and there’s a few here.
First, the story. The lack of explanation as to what is going on is pretty bad, but add to that the fact that they removed the best arc in the etire series, and there’s a big WTF right there. That’s right, the Zabuza arc, as well as Zabuza and Haku themselves, are nowhere to be seen. Why aren’t they there? It makes no sense, going straight from their training to the chounin exam. The Sasuke Rescue arc is also severely destroyed, changing all the ultra original battles with some of the most unique characters in the series to… a bunch of battles against Kimimaro. WTF.
Which leads us to the next point: the characters. Only 25 playable characters? Really? Narutimate Hero 3 (the japanese version of Ultimate Ninja 3) had 42 characters, and the last Narutimate Accel game on the PS2 had over 60 characters. You’d think that a PS3 Blu-Ray disc could enable for more, or at least as much… Something like all the pre-time jump characters at least… Where are Zabuza and Haku(nowhere to be found… at all…)? Where are the sound 4 (they’re reduced to mere support characters for Kimimaro in the story missions and you can’t even use them, as they are probably “downloadable content”)? Iruka, Mizuki, Anko, Kurenai, Asuma, Shizune, some joke character (such as Konohamaru)? Maybe show some recognition for Dosu/Kin/Zaku, the first 3 sound ninja who were pretty cool (before dying). The second and first hokage (who exist as support) could be nice. But no, they settled with 25 characters, and it sucks. At least some characters change completely after Awakening, boosting up the number just a bit, but still…
Another thing is the downloadable content… You get costumes, missions and support characters as downloadables. It’s free so that’s fine, but why no playable characters somewhere? That would definitely make up for the obvious lack of characters. And making some of the DLC only available to people who pre-ordered sucks ass as well, though it will probably be available to everyone later on.
There’s also a problem that kinda affects the gameplay: Loading times. It takes like 20 seconds to load the village, and if you want to finish ultimate mission mode, you’ll be reloading the village a LOT. The game starts you up with a 4GB (give or take a few MB), there’s no excuse for the village to take so long to load.
There’s a few other problems, like the Naruto cannon not always working properly, or jumps being really not accurate in town, Ultimate Jutsu being just a tad too powerful, the lack of online, just one Ultimate per character is a bit lame (it’s fine for side-characters, but some of the bigger characters could easily have 2 instead of one…didn’t they in the PS2 games?), but the lack of characters is really the biggest problem.
Overall
Despite the few problems, this is a great game and all Naruto fans should get it. Fun battle system, okay mini-games, the QTEs (quick-time events) are actually not bad here compared to… most other games that use it (and they aren’t used that much so it’s not too bad), incredible graphics and animation. It’s a Naruto fanboy’s dream come true… other than the huge lack of characters. The lack of online features might reduce the replay value for some people, but there’s still lots of fun to be had with the fighting system here.
If you’re not a Naruto fan, or an anime fan for that matter, at least try out the demo, chances are you’ll really like the fast-paced fighting system.
Note
Time played as of now: around 15 hours. Completion: All missions in Ultimate Mission mode, but not the bonus conditions in all missions(which can only be done after finishing the mission the first time). All characters unlocked, all(non-dlc) supports unlocked.
Other note: I suck at talking about fighting systems >_>
Save Point! 
no a salido para psra ps 2