The game has four gameplay modes including Story, Mission, Free Battle and Practice. Story is self-explanatory, it lets you select one of fourteen characters (seven of which you must unlock) and play through their story. Sadly, this mode is something only fans of the series can fully enjoy and understand. With your chosen character, you have to fight in six battles and each time you’re introduced to your opponent through a small introduction screen with them yabbering away at each other. After finishing all six battles, a small scene ending the character’s story plays. Generally, you will only be able to get a gist of what’s going on and for the most part, stare blankly at the screen while pressing the start button to skip to the action.
Unleash the ancient art of monkey Kung Fu.
Mission mode gives you a set of objectives to complete during a battle and by achieving them, you will be rewarded with money that can be used to purchase collectibles. Objectives are varied depending on the difficulty level but you’ll basically have as little as two or more objectives to complete. For instance, one mission requires you to let the timer run out and still have 80% of your health metre in tack while another requires you to climb a wall for two counts of the timer as well as winning the match. There are also missions that can be completed while playing in other modes such as collecting hidden scrolls laid out across each level by meeting certain requirements. This adds some variety to the gameplay and serves as a nice change from simply fighting against your opponent.
The Free Battle and Practice modes are as they sound. Battle with a friend or a CPU opponent with the characters and stage of your choice. Practice mode does however offer a small challenge when you pause the game and entering the control screen. It shows you all the different combos your character can use and will tell you which ones you’ve performed successfully. While it isn’t anything special, it was nice to have as it did familiarise us with the controls and revealed we weren’t timing the buttons accordingly.
Stages vary from Zabuza’s Hideout, a big mansion surrounded by demon-like creatures, to the Forest of Death, a seemingly harmless forest, with each having particular features which are unique from one another. The Forest of Death for example, has a giant snake which strikes at players who stand in its path. The Exams Stadium stage on the other hand, has a small underground chamber taking the battle to an enclosed space where air attacks can’t be performed. A key feature to the stages are they both feature a foreground and background path for you to fight on allowing you to switch your position on the battleground at your own leisure. The environments also contain many interactive objects including crates, billboards and spectators, all of which will drop power-ups and weapons when attacked.
This looks a little like America for some reason.
Power-ups include the usual food items that regenerate your health meter as well as a number of chakra recovery items. Chakra is used to perform your character’s secret techniques which consists of three levels, each more powerful than the last. When you use the technique, depending on level used, it will deduct the corresponding chakra from your chakra meter. Also, a short movie will play and require you to hit the coordinating buttons of your controller as they appear on screen. This will give your attacks more power while your opponent follows a similar setup, allowing them to minimise the damage they receive. At first the movies are visually impressive and really add extra hype to the game but sadly, you’ll soon find they get a little repetitive and slow down the action. On the plus side, each character has a different movie making it varied enough to not get overly annoying. Chakra is also used to walk on water in a few cases and if you’ve used up all of your chakra, you inevitably drown and loose health.
Offensive items range from powering down your enemy’s speed and throwing special Ninja weapons (that’s what they’re called in the game) which weaken your opponent. There’s also a few defensive items that can turn you invisible while others act as substitutes protecting you from attacks. A problem we had with the invisibility though was that it doesn’t really do much considering your character’s outline is clearly visible. At best, it will only distract your friend for a second or two.
A big bonus for fans of the series is Naruto: Ultimate Ninja has a considerably large amount of collectible items totaling at over 1,000. It will certainly keep you on your toes for a while. To obtain the collectible items, you need to purchase capsules from a dispenser machine, similarly like the trophy machine in Super Smash Bros Melee. You also have a choice of how much money you spend for each capsule and as we quickly found out, spending $1000 will get you items while $100 will instead get you blanks. For your collection, you can obtain figures, music and voice data tracks, along with videos of characters performing their secret techniques and Ninja stat cards which are stills from the anime. The figures in particular will take a vast amount of time to collect because every motion character models are capable of will be available to collect as a figure. The Orochi Maru collection for instance, has a figurine that animates his punch attacks while another figurine will animate how he dies when bested in battle. The secret technique videos are even more spread as there will be a separate video for every combination that can possibly occur.
This is actually Naruto "disguised" as a female.
So the game can capture the look and feel of the anime, the developers have used cel-shaded graphics. In more basic stages, the graphics can look a little plain at times yet in bigger stages such as Zabuza’s Hideout, there’s more motion in the background and more detail has been given to your surroundings. As previously mentioned, the secret technique movies are highly detailed and have some very nice effects, which carry the game on a lot. There’s also a matter of the spectators. While most items and surrounding are 3D, the spectators have been given a 2D effect which makes them look like the equivalent of a cardboard cut out. It’s apparent to us this was done on purpose so the spectators could maintain their appearance from the anime without too much alteration.
Eastern-style music is found everywhere which is a good thing considering it’s based around Ninjas. Typically, the developers have used the Naruto license well and have used the voice cast from the anime to lend their voices to the game. Sound effects have also been catered for flawlessly. We did notice that support character’s voices were muffled a fair bit, probably so it doesn’t distract you from the fight but essentially, you’ll learn their call and rush to get the item they hold.
While not a perfect fighting game, Naruto: Ultimate Ninja is worth looking at for fighting fans as it does bring to the mix some nice charm through its mission mode and large amount of collectible items. Fans of the series will simply enjoy fighting as their favourite characters while collecting the Ninja stat cards. Generally though, there’s enough to keep everyone happy.
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