The Naruto games have had an interesting life compared to its seemingly consistent predecessor, the anime.
It started out as an adventure fighter with a variety of ways to explore the ninja world around you, leaping from trees and diving at high speed during minigames to get from point A to point B but, eventually, the game found its own calling somewhat with a story-based, fighting game style.
Essentially the game itself played out the story, with you controlling parts of the interim, running around the village, completing mini games and tasks for extra items and that ever too needy 100% ranking. With Ultimate Ninja Storm 3 and Revolution a lot of those aspects are completely void. UNS 3 was a game much more akin to something like Asura’s Wrath minus the unique story. It played out the cutscenes with dialogue, threw you into a boss fight then another cutscene, fight, save zone. Rinse and repeat ad nauseam. It was here I feel that the Naruto franchise is trying too hard to become a mainstream fighter, and Revolution does not disprove this.
The game is split into essentially 3 modes: Ninja Escapades, Tournament 1 and 2. That is all outside of multiplayer. Firstly the Ninja Escapades, simply put, they are fully animated cutscene much like the anime that tell short stories within the ninja world, specifically before the events of the first episodes of the Naruto Anime. They give us some small details not yet shown in the animation, interspersed with a couple of fights that you control as the main character from that particular story. Its essentially watching the Anime, insert fight, done, no substance and nothing amazing done with it either, much like the events of Ninja Storm 3. Three of those wear down very fast so afterwards we are left with Ninja World Tournament, the main headline for the games release.
Ninja World Tournament brings characters from the entire Naruto timeline, top dog shinobi of the highest calibre, ranging from the first Hokage of the Hidden Leaf village (Known in Japanese as Konoha) all the way up to the recently revealed Obito in his pre-sage form.
The gameplay is simple enough, run around with the most annoying run animation for every character no matter who it is, select a mission from the Ninja World Tournament fight, repeat. In between missions you are allowed to freely run around the restricted area’s looking for more allies with which to team up with during the Tournament. The way to get allies is to complete their requests, most of which are “training fights”, others are “find me this item please, then you will have sufficiently gained my trust”.
Once you have allies, you can then go forward to the next stages of each tournament. The idea here is that you battle up to 4 fights using the allies you find out in the tournament island. The most fights you will have is 4 per section. The fights themselves are sort of clustered and unimpressive, combining 4 characters in one area, launching skills at each other, dodging around the place and throwing your special attacks. In previous titles in the Ultimate Ninja Storm franchise, you had a full arsenal of styles at your disposal as a standard, Awakening mode when you had low health, Ultimate jutsu when you have enough chakra etc. However it seems that in an attempt to balance the game, the decision has been made to make players choose a mode to use, either Drive, Ultimate Jutsu or Awakening, this will then be your only technique for the entire fight, without the switch up.
In previous games the ability to use all three types did unbalance online multiplayer heavily, however the multiplayer system was already broken due to the dash system whenever someone did a substitution jutsu against an attacker. The attacker has the option to immediately dash as soon as the substitution is done, meaning that you can immediately stun an enemy straight away, crushing chances of a counter and still leaving a certain play style rather over powered.
The battle system is not the only thing of disappointment here however, the game itself is simply too short lived. The inability, or rather the removal of, a vast ninja world to explore leaves the game world rather bland and 2D within its own 3D landscape of featureless world.
Simple yes, but unimaginative, leaving me bereft of interest in what im seeing, a stark contrast to what I know the Naruto universe offers us regularly with the anime.
In summary I cannot in good faith to the fans of the show put this forward as a recommendation unless you thought the steps taken in Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm 3 were for the positive. If you did, still in keeping with the anime at least that it did, then feel free to purchase this one. For the rest of you however, save your cash.