Naruto: The Equal-Opportunity Ninja

That Naruto series you kids love so much has one of the stranger licensing arrangements in the game industry. Rather than granting all the rights to one publisher and letting them run amok, like most licensers do, the Naruto people have split the rights up between different platforms. So you get one set of Naruto games on the Nintendo systems--those are put out by D3 in the US--and another, totally different series from Namco Bandai and developer CyberConnect2 on the PlayStation platforms. Both of those series have traditionally focused on fighting game-style action. Most recently, Ubisoft swooped in and picked up Xbox Naruto rights, which they turned into the first open-world Naruto game, Rise of a Ninja, late last year.

Not to be outdone, CyberConnect 2's first PlayStation 3 Naruto game, Ultimate Ninja Storm, has a similar open-world element to it, which Namco Bandai showed off in a recent visit to the Giant Bomb dungeon. The Konoha in this game seems like more of a simple hub, where you simply talk to characters and pick up story and side missions. Those missions will then pop a loading screen that sends you off into other areas not physically connected to Konoha where you get your ninja-fighting business taken care of. That's in contrast to Ubi's game, where you pursued a lot of missions inside Konoha, and which had you manually traveling on foot to other objectives located in the wilderness outside the Leaf Village.

I have to imagine there's a semi-friendly rivalry going between Ubisoft and Namco Bandai with their respective Naruto games. Ubi is already back this year with a sequel, The Broken Bond, which picks up where the last game left off (somewhere around episode 80 of the anime). By contrast, Ultimate Ninja Storm apparently covers the same span of the series' story arc as both of Ubi's games. It must be weird for those teams, only being able to make their game on one platform, and getting to see what the other team does with the same material on a different, comparable piece of hardware.

One of the big features Namco is pushing with this game is epic, enormous boss fights, and by example they showed off an encounter with Orochimaru, who was riding on top of a big gnarly purple snake that had to be 100 feet tall, at least. The gameplay seems to be a little dumbed down by necessity in these sequences, since the camera angles go all over the place and you can't really take on a 20-story-tall snake in hand-to-hand combat anyway. (Because it has no hands! Ha! Ugh.) The fight mostly involved dodging projectiles, throwing projectiles, and hitting buttons through some God of War-style interactive cutscenes. But what it lacked in deep gameplay, it more than made up for with bombastic presentation. It looked more like prerendered video than actual gameplay, but it was all running in real-time.

Ultimate Ninja Storm's fighting engine is more reminiscent of stuff like Power Stone than a traditional hardcore 2D fighter. The attack controls are simplified--one button for melee, one for projectile attacks, and so on--so it's easy to play, and the game does a good job of making a lot of cool stuff happen even when you're just flailing on the buttons. You also get to pick a couple of helpers before each match and even select which of their attacks to bring in with you, so the fights end up looking varied with six different characters flying all over the place all the time. The camera angle is a little strange, since it's placed behind and over the shoulder of one of the two fighters, but I got used to it after a couple of matches, and it just helped amp up the dynamic appearance of the fights. There's a demo out on the PlayStation Network that I believe focuses solely on the fighting, so go grab that and see for yourself if you can get down with this kind of simple/cinematic action.

Now, I'm no big fan of Naruto, the anime, but I played through Rise of a Ninja last year because 1) I'm a sucker for a reasonably well-designed open-world game, and 2) it was gorgeously cel-shaded. This year I think Ultimate Ninja Storm might look even better. If you're a graphics whore like myself, you have to appreciate the way these cartoon-styled games are pushing the graphical techniques and cinematic flair required to make them resemble their source material. There were times in that massive boss fight where Ultimate Ninja Storm looked for all the world like a high-def anime episode, not a video game. So I'll continue to be interested in this and other anime games on the 360 and PS3 completely irrespective of their subject matter, just to see how amazing they end up looking.

Here's a little footage of the fighting action we grabbed during Namco's visit to our office. We tried to record some of the open-world Konoha stuff and that boss fight too, but the PR rep shadow clone jutsu'd that notion into oblivion.