Review: Naruto: Rise of a Ninja

Gameplay: 7
Sound: 6
Graphics: 8
Value: 5
Overall: 7.3

The Good
· Graphical fidelity that makes you love anime.
· Can turn into half naked lady.
· Awesome water.
· Grass that looks like facial hair.

The Bad
· Average fighting portions
· Story that doesn’t make any sense whatsoever

I’ve never seen the Naruto Anime show that this game is based on, mainly because I fucking hate anime and so therefore, I’m totally unbiased towards it (ehm). I came to this game thinking that it would be a really cool action game that would mix the fighting genre with action platforming to create a unique gameplay experience, and I was right. What Naruto: Rise of a Ninja does, is create a fantastic game for the fans of the show to play around in, but at the same time, if you’d never have heard of the Naruto cartoon you’d still feel right at home playing the game simply because the gameplay experience is very unique and very cool.

As a novice of the Naruto brand myself, the thing that helped me to really get a feel for the game was the characters. To state the obvious, you play as Naruto, a Ninja dropout and a bit of a loud mouth. The other two main characters (and members of your Ninja squad) are called Sakura and Sasuke. These two are really, really antagonising. As the only failed Ninja in the whole village, to be ridiculed by your two squadron members makes Naruto angry and ready - as all ninjas do - to seek revenge.

The most bizarre aspect of Naruto by far is the story. If you’re a fan of the ‘random’ then you’ll be in your element with this game but if you don’t like Nine tailed Foxes and giant frogs then you’d best do what I did and skip the cut scenes because those things were creepy and more often then not plain stupid. Graphically, Naruto looks stunning and could be easily passed off as a cartoon. The Leaf Village, your hub town, is stunningly architected, with buildings jutting out in all the right places, and dissected by a beautiful river that runs all the way down the middle. You get the impression that the folks over at Ubisoft Montreal spent a great deal of time getting the village looking as amazing and as close to cartoon as possible in order to keep the fans happy, and also because you’ll be spending well over half of your time picking up and completing missions inside of the village boundaries, as well as just having a good time messing around.

The main bulk of your experience inside of the world of Naruto will be spent picking up quests and completing missions. Generally speaking, there are couple of types on missions that fans of action or action/ adventure will be very familiar with. The two main ones are race missions and retrieval missions. The race missions are pretty straight forward. When you start a race you have to run through the green circles and get to the end. Simple. The retrieval missions are the most fun however, and with these you’ll spend your time adventuring outside the Leaf Village picking up important scrolls and fighting Bandits. However, it’s the fighting of these Bandits that’s the worst thing about the game overall. For the first few fights you’ll find the combat quite an interesting section to this unique experience, but alas, you’re going to get bored of fighting the same four or five enemies over and over again; I think that’s inevitable. Even the bosses are boring. I don’t want to ‘ruin’ any of the great boss sequences for you so I won’t go into too much detail, but...well they’re the same.

Moreover, it’s not just the enemies that are, shall we say, retarded, but it’s the fighting itself. You see, the fighting isn’t deep enough to keep the fight sequences interesting and so you end up with whole sections of the game which are on a way lower level than the rest of the game. Ubi have tried to keep things interesting though by allowing the player to be able to upgrade Naruto’s powers, power ups and abilities – original I know - by purchasing them from any one of the stores located in the fucking Leaf Village or from your Ninja trainer-guy. The only interesting aspects of the combat are the special attacks, or Jutsus. These allow you to pull of some extremely crazy and sometimes borderline insane moves that can allow you to win fights, jump up trees or even turn into a half naked lady. Yes, you heard correctly. It’s retarded.

Thankfully for the games’ reputation’s sake, the platforming in Naruto is really fantastic (although as unoriginal as a Hitler joke). Travelling from the Leaf Village to your destination is really good fun and attempts a sense of speed that even modern Sonic game doesn’t achieve. Speaking of speed, by far the fastest sections of the game are those where, in true ninja tradition, Naruto gets to jump around through the trees to get from location to location. At first, these sequences are really interesting, and again, create small distractions from the main chunks of gameplay. However, after a few of these tree jumping sequences, the odds are that they’re going to get boring, especially because if you miss a branch when you jump, you fall to the ground and you have to face a Bandit, which – as previously stated – isn’t all that fun. However, It is these sections, where you venture out of the city, that the graphics particularly shine. The water (which I have already mentioned) looks like some of the best I’ve ever seen in a game and the grass and other foliage looks particularly orgasmic. I think it’s the animation, though, which really stands out as special. When you walk through the grass everything waves around you and similarly, when you run, your arms flail about making you look slightly crippled, nevertheless, they’re all nice touches which give the game it’s own identity.

So that’s the single player covered but wait! There’s a multiplayer portion to the game too. But it sucks hairy, soggy, testicles. What you’re getting here, is a kind of tournament mode, where you go head to head in an arena. However, the people that you go up against keep flooding in. In theory, this is a really interesting idea because it means you don’t have to find another match and do all of that stuff to play a game, but instead, you’ll have to fight whoever is thrown into your room. That means that it could be any random pervert; even if they’re like...ten times better then you, and that’s not always fun.

Basically, what you’re getting with Naruto: Rise of a Ninja is a good action/ adventure game with some excellent platforming sections and pretty graphics. The story mode, despite it’s short length is relatively fun compared to the hacked on multiplayer and for Naruto fans and novices alike, this is surely a great way to get into the series and most importantly, is a great example of where a creative licence can be used to make a great game. Word!

--Tom Rhodes, 360Stage Editor--