Naruto Shippuden Ultimate Ninja: Storm 2 surprised me. I was expecting a straight- forward, thumb straining fighting game. Imagine my delight when there were adventure elements like an RPG. The game follows the anime story fairly faithfully, which means the storyline is complex and interesting.
As the story begins, Naruto has returned to Hidden Leaf Village after a three-year absence. If you play the Ultimate Adventure, you play primarily as Naruto and occasionally as other characters as they try to protect the village from evil invading forces.
You can talk with villagers and collect items to use to make more potent food, cures and gifts. There are several shops in the village where you can buy items that you can use to extend your fighting abilities before a fight, add to your arsenal during a fight, or regain health after a fight.
If you are a Naruto fan, this game allows you to explore the world of anime pretty thoroughly. You can explore Hidden Leaf Village, Hidden Sand Village and Hidden Rain village among other sites.
Unfortunately, for game play, that gets a little tiring. While the graphics and animation of this game are beautiful, there is no way to skip through territory you’ve already covered. During the little side missions between the boss battles you have to cover the same territory over and over and the load times between all the scenes gets to be tiring. There are also a lot of completely useless conversations to be had with all the villagers and their talk icons never go away, so I was always wondering if I should talk to everyone all over again in case some of them had something relevant to say.
Since I’m a bigger fan of adventure games and RPGs than I am of fighting games, I was disappointed that the Ultimate Adventure track wasn’t quite as rich as it could have been. It would have been nice if some of those conversations with random villagers had lead to interesting missions or the discovery of exotic items, but they never seemed to.
So let’s talk about the fighting, which is after all, the meat and potatoes of the game. The system is interesting. The biggest, most effective combos come from increasing chakra by pressing the triangle button. Most of the combos are then combinations of the circle and x buttons. The square button sends whatever flying projectiles your character possesses at the opponent. In Naruto’s case it’s shuriken. You can also block using L2 or R2, but your timing has to be perfect or the block is ineffective. There is a neat trick that if you press the block button at the right moment you can end up behind your opponent and attack from there.
The fights are straightforward battles, but you have a choice of items to load on the arrow keys that can enhance your abilities. Choosing the right items for an opponent is a big part of the strategy of the battles and can be critical to defeating a boss.
Interaction with the environment during the battles isn’t possible, so there is no grabbing a rock from the scene and flinging it at your opponent, however there are some team battles. In the first battle, for example, you tag team with Sakura to take down Kakashi sensei. All in all, the combos are not difficult to learn, but getting the right balance of enhancements and combinations to take down a boss can be a little tricky. Different bosses have different abilities, so what works with one won’t necessarily work with another, which adds an interesting complexity to the fights. The best thing about the fighting, however, is how beautifully it’s rendered. During the fight scenes the game really comes alive and the cut scenes during the boss battles are spectacular.
In Free Battle you can chose your character and your opponent as you fight against the computer in a team match or single match or you can play against a friend or you can select the characters and have the computer play against itself, which is kind of fun. I have the computer fighting itself in the background as I write this. Because the graphics on this game are so good, watching the fights is almost as fun as participating in them.
As with most games, as you win battles you unlock new characters to play and you can open cut scenes to watch. The Online Battle section of the game is essentially the same as the Free Battle section. You can choose to join a team match or a single player match and you can choose your opponent by rank or connectivity. The only real advantage I see to the Online Battle is if this is your favorite game and you’re always cruising for someone new to fight, but it doesn’t add anything unique to the game.
Naruto Shippuden Ultimate Ninja: Storm 2 is a beautiful game, which if you’re like me and get tired of the post apocalyptic grimness of so many games, is a welcome change. Not that the village doesn’t get burned out and nothing bad happens, it’s just nice that the whole game isn’t in gray tones. The music is also nice and matches the game perfectly.
Sadly, the voiceover isn’t synched very well so that the characters mouths are moving long after the voiceover has stopped, which is a minor irritation, but one that’s hard to ignore.
So is this a game for non-Naruto fans? Honestly, probably not. I wouldn’t call myself a big Naruto fan, but I have seen some of the anime and knew the storyline. I’m an anime fan and I think that’s enough to really enjoy this game. However, I don’t see myself playing it through more than once, and I doubt I’ll ever cruise for fights online beyond what I did for this review.
While I really appreciated the RPG aspects of this game, they aren’t robust enough to recommend it to RPG fans who aren’t also Naruto fans or at least anime fans. If you’re a fighting game fan, but not a Naruto fan, there are other hardcore fighting games that would be better choices for you.
I would highly recommend this game for Naruto fans. It’s a must have. I would also recommend it to anime fans or to anyone who is looking for more of a playable storyline in their fighting games. CyberConnect2 has done some great stuff with this game. I’d love to see them tackle a full on Naruto RPG.