It’s a game about Ninjas after all, nobody cares what reading groups Kratos is in, right? Calling the selection of characters broad would be a massive understatement, and to say the same about fighting styles would be equally so. So combat… Here’s where the game, naturally, shines. Survival, Vs, No-Nonsense Tournament, Practice and the like. Here it’s just a matter of enjoying the awesome combat system and the many spectacles that come with it in a variety of different, but instantly gratifying, scenarios against the computer or with friends.
Maybe this is in keeping with the show? While Ninja Tournament Mode fronts like it’s the main game, I can only figure that the true main mode can be found in free battle. Twenty minutes of awful and laboured dialogue followed by twenty seconds of combat. I don’t dislike the game, I just think there’s a lot that is keeping you from actually fighting. I’m probably coming across a lot more bitter than I am intended right now. This would have been a lot more enjoyable had I not been sent to the job centre halfway through to deliver noodles all over a town to help a scientist do their adding and subtraction. Naruto and Hinata discover the wreckage of some odd thing (that nobody seems to be able to identify is a robot designed to look like Naruto) and from that a story of betrayal, identity and friendship unravels. The Mecha-Naruto story actually plays out like a story. Here’s where things, for a moment, got interesting. After playing through what I had initially thought was an incredibly brief Ninja Tournament – before discovering that finishing the tournament just means you go back to the main menu, being given the option to change character and continue from the next tier – I discovered I had unlocked the Mecha-Naruto storyline. Much more fun!” This was the first in a long list of things I had a grievance with. For the record, if anybody wants to say “You could have just bought the book from the shop and had all the questions answered” my response is “Ahh, a fetch quest. One of my first experiences after arriving on Ninja Tournament Island was some kind of Naruto trivia event to get people to join my team so that I would be able to participate in the tournament… and I don’t know Naruto… so you can see my problem. My problem with it is that it’s not quite that. Naturally, if the show is often about who is the best and people fighting over that fact, then naturally a tournament is a good way to go. You see, the Ninja World Tournament, being the main part of the game, is a bitter pill to swallow.
While fighting you have an item palette allocated to the directional buttons that you can kit out with the things you need or want during a fight, such as a quick guard breaking attack, temporary status ailment or a potion of some sort. The reason being that items play a role in combat. Money made and items purchased will be available wherever you are and whichever Ninja you embody. Across all of these game modes there is a shared inventory and bank. And lastly, Free Battle, which I personally would have been very upset had it not been included… but we’ll get to that later. You’ll enjoy some brilliantly brought to life cinematics before being put in a fight relevant to what you’ve just seen. There are four game modes and they are: Ninja World Tournament, which serves as the main story mode Online Battle, which it’s fairly self explanatory Ninja Escapades, which drops you into a thirty to forty minute long story segment of, what I can only assume is, moments throughout the franchises expansive history. That is Naruto and his many variants: Naruto, Naruto on fire, Mecha-Naruto, Tired and encumbered Naruto, etc. Resulting in my decision as to who I chose as my avatar to be largely decided upon by the name of the game.
Also, not being an existing fan of the TV/Manga series hinders me somewhat as, while the game offers an incredibly epic selection of characters to pick from, I had no idea what was so special about any of them.
This is the first Naruto game I’ve played, so my point of reference to its past is considerably limited by that, but if the Dragon Ball Z games are anything to go by, and from what I can tell they are, the additions this game introduces are minimal to most, but extremely welcome amongst the games followers. On it’s surface, and in many ways, it is a fantastic little game, however it hobbles itself somewhere along the way. Developed by CyberConnect2 and published by Bandai Namco, Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja STORM Revolution, which rabid dogs couldn’t keep me from simply referring to as “Naruto” or “this/the game” from this point onwards, is a fighting game that is most appropriately compared to the Dragon Ball Z series than it is to, say, Namco’s own Tekken franchise.