Oh, great. A game based on a Japanimation children's show I have never seen and in turn based on a Manga I will never read. That was my first thought when I open the package for Shonen Jump's Naruto: Ultimate Ninja. (I mean, it even came with four collector cards for an accompanying card game. Because you can never have enough Anime rip-offs of Magic. Right?)
Originally published in the pages of Shohen Jump magazine, Naruto tells the story of a 12-year-old boy who is studying to become a ninja, or at least that's what I gather from all the websites I've surfed through trying to find information about it.
Thankfully, the video game does not require anyone to know much about this series as it's a fighting game, where you can choose between the various ninja kids.
The game is divided into four main areas: a practice mode where you can train and learn moves, free battle where you square off against another human player or a computer player, a mission mode where during battles you have to achieve certain goals to progress through ninja school and a scenario mode where you play through the storyline of a particular character.
By winning fights, you earn money which you can use to try and win prizes at the local shop. Occasionally, you win stuff that can help you in battle, but usually it's just extraneous items, such as music data, cards and figurines which you can view at Naruto's house.
There's not a lot of difference between most of the modes or of modes of other fighting games. In practice mode, you essentially spar as normal, but you can choose if and how your opponent fights back.
In free battle mode, it's like any two-player mode in a fighting game. But you can also choose to fight a specific computer opponent or face one chosen at random. This may seem like a no-brainer to include, but this very option is missing in Street Fighter Alpha Anthology, which I recently reviewed. There, you can only play as two players in its versus mode while in the arcade mode, you always fight the characters in the same order.
To be fair, the scenario mode is basically the same thing for Naruto. You play each character's saga and fight the baddies in a set order. And the storylines are pretty pointless and probably would only make sense to fans of the Manga or cartoon. But they are each only six fights long and by completing them you can unlock additional scenarios, and access to more characters in the free battle mode.
And the mission mode doesn't really involve much in the way of real missions. Most of the objectives are things such as defeat the opponent in a certain time limit or win the battle with at least half of your energy left. It's nothing too exciting.
But the battles themselves put Naruto above other fighting games. Instead of the standard of two characters combat against a flat background, which is just primarily there to make the screen look less dull, Naruto allows the fighters to move around the environment and interact with it. Although still essentially two-dimensional, you can jump to different areas of the screen. In one level, for example, you're able to fight on a bridge, below it in a boat on the water or above it on a construction platform. At times, you can even transport to different battle screens.
You can also interact with people and objects in the background to collect health, weapons and chakra to perform special jutsu moves.
When these jutsu moves are activated, the screen switches to a cut scene. These scenes are very fluid and well-animated. They look like they are taken directly from an episode of the television show.
But what's good is that this part of the fight is still interactive. Both characters have to perform a sort of Simon game and press the buttons in the order the screen tells them to. If the attacker succeeds, the jutsu will progress to another stage of attack. (Each jutsu has up to three stages. If the attacker is successful on the final stage of attack, he or she will inflict “critical damage.”) If the one of being attacked is successful in the Simon game, the damage he or she receives will be reduced.
And although it gets a little annoying after awhile, if you keep performing the same moves, these pseudo-cut scenes have the sensibility of a Japanese cartoon. For example, when the title character activates his harem jutsu, he transforms into a belly dancer for the final attack. Afterwards, another character appears out of nowhere to hit him on the head and yell, “You and your stupid jutsu!” Ah, Anime! It's all so incoherent!
Although, Naruto has a lot of unnecessary elements, it still is one of the most enjoyable fighting games I have played in a long time.
WHAM! Rating: |
7 out of 10 |
ESRB Rating: |
T (Teen) |
Official Web Site: |
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