Naruto: Rise of a Ninja is a brand new game for the Xbox 360, and not a several year old port. The Naruto anime series in Japan has gone past 250 episodes, whereas the series has only just passed 100 episodes in America and elsewhere. So Naruto: Rise of a Ninja is a game for this audience, and it makes sense that the game covers the saga from the beginning up to roughly episode 80. This takes the game to the end of the siege on the titular ninja’s home village of Konoha. So the game covers the sagas in the Land of Waves, the Forest of Death and Chunin exams, as well as everything in between. It doesn’t make for an exceedingly lengthy experience but it covers what the newer fans would have seen up to.
If you haven’t watched any episodes of Naruto, the entire single player story has a lot of minute-or-so long clips from the show that fill in scenes that would otherwise be populated by (potentially) shoddy cut-scenes. It works on both levels, for fans and non-fans, but they’re probably a bit too short to really make sense to the uninitiated. The single player mode in Naruto: Rise of a Ninja has preferred to focus purely on the titular character, Naruto himself, rather than the show in general. The result is a free-roaming adventure title that allows the player to pursue the game’s objectives as they wish. Players will start off in Konoha and can explore at their leisure. Konoha is no Liberty or Vice City, but there’s plenty of terrain to explore, and you get more out of it as the game progresses.
Village hero or village idiot?
A lot of the village is inaccessible until Naruto gains some ninja abilities and you don’t really appreciate the game until you do. The first hour or so of the game is a bit slow and somewhat restricted. Once you’re able to sprint, double jump, walk up vertical surfaces (chakra concentration) and break barriers (shadow clone jutsu), the possibilities for exploration and adventure open up before you. A few of these abilities are performed using simulated hand-gestures that mimic the gestures in the show. However, it’s not just the abilities that open up the game, but the variety of tasks that you perform. Among the primary ninja missions, namely those that follow the story and a few diversionary tasks are there as well. The only detractor to this variety is that most missions are mainly fetch quests.
The ninja missions are obviously the highlight of the game and are the ones that tie-in directly to the show. They are delivered to you in a typically open-ended context, where you look at your mini-map and follow the next mission indicator. From there, it’s the usual run around that follows from one objective to the other. Apart from the ninja missions, you have social missions that help your relations with the rest of the people in the village. As you complete social and ninja missions, you’ll earn chunks of health and chakra bar. The mini-games in the village can be fun. You can play hide-and-seek, partake in ninja races and deliver ramen. The hide-and-seek is particularly entertaining, while ninja race is reminiscent of the races found in Crackdown, which can only be a good thing. To get to different lands later on, you’ll go through tree sequences that are quite exhilarating.
Early in the game, you’ll unlock a few outlets that will provide you with scrolls to enhance your abilities, weapons and other supplies that will help you when you go on ninja missions. You’ll also learn abilities progressively and you’ll be able to learn combos in exchange for points that you earn through playing. When you start the game, the village will be entirely against you. By completing missions and tasks, you’ll gain their trust. This helps, because those that have a smiley icon above them will help you by pointing you in the right direction if you get lost. It’s quite a good tie-in to the themes in the show.
Why have one dragon when you can have two?
There is one aspect of the game that you’ll spend a lot of time on, and that’s actually fighting. Obviously to ‘relive’ some of the defining moments, you have to take part in them somehow. Unfortunately, you only play as Naruto in the story mode and you’ll face off in every major battle that Naruto participated in. In between the major battles, Naruto will face off against a series of generic enemies, including bandits and rogue ninjas, as you move outside of the village. As the game and Naruto’s abilities progress, so will the enemy difficulties. The encounters are in fixed locations and regrettably become somewhat annoying at the back end of the game. It would have been nice if specific victory conditions were added to the major battles and very nice if we could play in the major battles between other characters as well, even as an outside option.
The fighting engine is a bit of an odd one. It is better than the fighting engine in the Ultimate Ninja series but some aspects of the Clash of Ninja series are better. Apart from a series of combos, each character has ninja techniques at their disposal. The general gist of the system, is to knock the opponent back and give yourself enough time to charge a technique, following the hand signal input. Each technique has three levels of intensity and each level will require more time. Once charged, you’ll either enhance your abilities or you and the opponent will enter in a mini-game, where the attacker tries to maximise damage and the opponent tries to minimise it. Finally, if your health is low, you can sometime enter rage mode that makes you temporarily invulnerable. In the single player, enemies can be quite tough, so there is a very nifty method of revival that again ties in with the actual themes of the show extremely well.
This engine translates into a multiplayer mode, which is very nicely presented and includes a ranking match system known as the Forest of Death exam. It’s quite a novel way for hosting these matches, and it works really well. While the engine is simple, it can be a lot of fun as matches can swing violently. The matchmaking was reasonably quick but we had an issue with the lag that was online, as it prevented substitutions occurring as we would have liked. Also, there seems to be an obvious preference for the shorter characters and for those who know what they’re doing, Gaara can be somewhat cheap. It suggests that the balance isn’t quite as level as we would have liked. However, the fighting is fast, furious and can be a lot of fun, even if it isn’t particularly deep. Hopefully, the promised downloadable characters will add to what is a rather meagre roster.
It's all in the technique.
Visually, Naruto: Rise of a Ninja is one of the few games that actually makes use of cel-shading on the next-gen consoles. At times, you can see the benefits, but at others, you’d feel that it could do more. Either way, this is easily the best representation of the Naruto world, both artistically and technically. The game has a vibrant air and plays very smoothly and fluidly, without many hitches along the way. Occasionally, the camera can’t handle things but otherwise, it’s a very good looking game. The worst part of the presentation is that it doesn't include characters that are non-playable, which looks really silly in important scenes. In terms of sound, Naruto probably has one of the best English dubs out there. In particular, Naruto’s voice is extremely well cast and is very well-implemented in general. It doesn’t make us miss the Japanese voices too much. It’s also one of the few anime games to actually use music from the show and again, it’s implemented very well. In all, the audio-visual presentation is extremely faithful and well put together.
Naruto: Rise of a Ninja as a package is easily one of the best efforts to bring an anime to home consoles and one of the best franchise efforts in general. Sure, it doesn’t reach Goldeneye status, but at the same time, it just gets so many gameplay aspects right and at the same time, is immensely faithful to the source material. It’s a little fetch quest heavy, the roster is small and the fighting isn’t that well explained or as balanced as it could be, but as far as franchise representations go, you’d be hard pressed to find one that’s better. Then there is the promise of some enticing downloadable content that actually looks to address some of the minor issues. So if you’re a fan of the series, Naruto: Rise of a Ninja is pretty much the game that you’ve been looking for and that your friends can enjoy. Believe it!
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