Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 2 Review

You could be forgiven for thinking that all games based on Japanese anime are poorly made cash-ins, and up until a few years back that was the case. Recently though we've been treated to a pair of decent Naruto games from Ubisoft, with Rise of a Ninja and Broken Bond giving gamers the chance to step into Naruto’s shoes and explore the Hidden Leaf Village. Namco Bandai Games has since released their own Naruto game, with Japanese developer CyberConnect2's Ultimate Ninja Storm receiving favourable reviews on release. Two years later, and both parties are at it again, with Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 2 introducing gamers to Naruto several years after the events depicted in the first series of the anime and retells the story of the later Shippuden series that follows Naruto’s adventures as he returns to the Hidden Leaf village.

At its core, Ultimate Ninja Storm 2 is a fighting game with a minimal amount of adventure genre staples in the form of missions and side missions (referred to as requests in the game), with the ability to explore your surroundings and talk to other characters, as well as purchase items from the numerous stores spread throughout the game world. While the Shippuden story is quite intriguing, the exposition in the game tends to drag on for what feels like hours at some points. It also doesn’t help matters that the story is told through the traditional JRPG method of having you hit a button to go through each character’s lines, which can become hugely frustrating. That being said, the story does have some wonderful moments, meaning you'll eventually find yourself emphasizing with Naruto and his friends’ plight.

In addition to a Free Battle Mode and online battles you'll also get your chance to play through the Ultimate Adventure mode that let's you play through the story of the Shippuden series. It's a good 10 to 15 hours long but most of that time will see you performing all manner of repetitive courier missions for characters, with little to no mission variety on offer. Thankfully, you can avoid the side quests if you feel that they're becoming too irritating, however, this does cut down on the actual game time available in the story mode.

The combat system in Ultimate Ninja Storm 2 is fairly simplistic, so hardcore Street Fighter players won't find their fix here. You’ve got a primary attack and a projectile attack that can be used in combos, with your Ninjutsu attacks being your only other form of offence. You can use your Ninjutsu and Ultimate Jutsu attacks by building up your chakra meter and using a button combo to initiate the attack. Throughout your battles you'll need to carefully balance your use of chakra with your ability to attack as using too many Jutsu attacks will drain your chakra and leave you with very few attacking options.

Adding flavour to the fights is the characters' abilities to use environmental attacks and defensive moves. As an example, in one of the earliest fights against Kakashi you’ll have to avoid his lightning attacks that charge the water you’re fighting on while using Sakura’s support attacks to take him down from a distance before attacking with Naruto himself. It’s an aspect of the fights that’s sadly missing from the Free Battles but it does serve to flesh out the battle system somewhat.

While the combat might be simplistic in nature it's certainly beautiful in execution, with animation sequences that capture the scale of some of the biggest battles in the anime series. You’ll frequently be blown away by some of the visuals on display during story battles as fights move from one arena to the next via some wonderful transitions, with characters transforming and morphing into other forms or taking to the air and battling it out. It’s during these sequences that you’ll have to make use of quick time events (QTEs) to avoid enemy attacks or to successfully finish off an opponent at the end of a fight. The QTEs aren’t too frequent, but they do detract somewhat from the epic sequences on display.

The characters and game world in Ultimate Storm 2 are simply beautiful, with a cell shaded look that’s reminiscent of the anime series, and at times looks even better than the original artwork. The characters have all been faithfully recreated and the environments you explore look like they’ve come straight off your television screen.

Naruto fans will also be pleased to hear that Ultimate Ninja Storm 2 gives you the option of English or Japanese voice actors. The voice work veers between better than average and atrocious, although switching to the original Japanese voice cast does somewhat alleviate the problem. The soundtrack is a mixture of the anime series’ themes and JRPG numbers, with the tune playing in the Hidden Leaf village sounding like it was taken straight from a Final Fantasy game.

For die hard Naruto fans there’s plenty on offer here, with collectibles to purchase with ninja info cards, recaps of the first game’s story, secret factor memory sequences to unlock during battles, and many other tidbits to keep fans playing for hour after hour. For the rest of us though, once we’ve seen all the battle sequences and played through the game’s first chapter or two, there’s really not much else on offer. At the end of the day, Naruto fans will be picking this up regardless of what anyone has to say, but for everyone else, there's plenty of other competent fighting games out there with far more to offer.

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