Naruto: Ninja Council 3 Review - DS

Naruto: Ultimate Ninja 2 is a real improvement on the last Naruto fighter for the PS2, which is more of a surprise than you might think. Bandai’s anime-licensed games have never been too famous for learning from their mistakes.

It’s made by a capable, professional team, though – Cyber Connect2, the studio that also gave us the .hack series – and you can tell that after their first try, they wanted to learn how to make a better fighting game. From the tuned-up command response to the streamlined level design, this is a much more polished, playable game.

Which is probably more than most Naruto fans were looking for, but lucky for them, they got it anyway. There’s obviously room for improvement here. No doubt to be filled in third and fourth Ultimate Ninjas installments, but this should be enough to satisfy fans for now.

Chunin Exams

In a broad sense, this is a lot like the first Ultimate Ninja. It’s a two-player head-to-head fighter. While the characters move back and forth on a 2D plane, the stages have some 3D depth to them, with multiple planes to fight on. There’s also a lot of “verticality” to some stages – higher spots to hop up to or tunnels and other areas that delve underground.

When it comes to the details, though, it feels pretty different. The first game felt more like a Power Stone or Smash Brothers, something that should have had more open arenas and four-player support. Ultimate Ninja 2 picks up the pace and tightens up the control response considerably –combinations flow out quickly and consistently, which makes this more fun to play against a single opponent. It’s much easier to tell that you landed an attack because your strategy and timing worked, as opposed to luck simply putting your opponent in the right spot. Defensive moves demand more precise timing, so it’s harder to simply dodge and counter everything.

This works together with level designs that also work much better for two-player battles. Originally, Ultimate Ninja had big, multilayered stages, and jumping from layer to layer took some slightly tedious fiddling around. Ultimate Ninja 2 cuts the scale down a little. There isn’t as much jumping back and forth between planes – you don’t need that much room for two characters, after all. The stage designs do a better job of pushing combatants together, while at the same time they aren’t at all short on variety. Several of them do some interesting things with low ceilings or uneven surfaces to make moving around more tricky and challenging.

Of course, there’s still a few things that could stand a little fixing, particularly the super-powerful Chakra attacks. These are very easy to execute command-wise (they only take a couple of button presses), but the chances of actually landing them are so unpredictable that they’re not all that useful despite dealing ridiculous amounts of damage. When they actually do hit, they trigger a string of cut scenes that less patient gamers will probably tap their toes sitting though. It’s fine if the Chakra moves are tough to pull off, but CC2 should do it by making the commands and their timing more challenging, not by making the animations seemingly hit or whiff at random.

Who Is This Hokage Person Anyway?

Of course, if you want to sit and watch lots of wacky 3D pyrotechnics, feel free to load up the practice mode and reel off Chakra moves for hours. CC2’s animators do a great job of giving the whole game a comic-book feel – there are lots of animated Japanese “sound effects” and other over-the-top touches. Watch for the icing on Naruto’s famously distracting “Sexy Jutsu,” where his teacher shows up to clobber him upside the head.

They’ve also put in some overtime expanding the character selection, filling out the supporting cast with more minor fighters from the TV series. Counting powered-up variations (like Naruto in his nine-tailed fox form), the sequel has 32 characters to the original’s 14. Even though their move lists aren’t particularly long, there’s a lot of differentiation in fighting styles between them. The selection helps add a lot of depth to what’s still a comparatively simple fighting system.

Most of the characters get a workout in the single-player mode, too – even though there’s only one plotline to follow. Naruto skips back and forth between fights involving the main characters and more minor ones. The storyline (which begins around episode 60 of the TV show, the end of the Chunin exams and Orochimaru’s attack on the Hidden Leaf Village) also has plenty of gaps between missions, where players can wander around a big, non-linear overworld, talk to other characters, buy extra items to use during fights, and play a collection of mini-games that includes some very funny in-jokes. If you don’t watch the show, the humor’s basically impenetrable, but then in that case you probably wouldn’t be playing the game in the first place.

Onward and Upward

If you are a fan, you’ll find this a lot more impressive than last year’s Ultimate Ninja. It’s a better job of making a fighting game and a better job of bringing the TV show to life, with more characters, better graphics, and a deeper single-player game. What problems it has aren’t hard to overlook – there’s always some cool new distraction hitting the screen.

Article by: D. F. Smith
Video Produced by: Michael Leffler