While being a fan of the show I have very much stayed away from the games based on it. Most have tended to be either average or just downright bad in quality. Ninja Storm for the PS3 was the one exception I finally made. After buying a PS3 just to play Valkyria Chronicles, I decided to look up some other good PS3 only titles and Ninja Storm was one of them. It didn't disappoint, however, the whole concept of missions and the story was kinda like you were popping in clipshows to play while jumping around Konoha. You were very much limited to just the city. That aside, the fighting was much better than any other Naruto game I had seen or tested. Fights moved fluid and quick without much downtime. There also wasn't an insane learning curve.
Ninja Storm 2 continues this tradition of great fighting. Its not hard to become good with a character but its not like tradition fighting games where you can just spam the same moves over and over. Unless you have the difficulty set real low when fighting the AI.
The story is also fantastic since it is based on some of the best Shippuden story arcs since it began. However, I will warn you that if you are a big fan of the show, you'll be disappointed. A lot of scenes have been cut, some of them real good ones too. Overall I'd say Ninja Storm 2 is a summary of the events from Shippuden episode 1 to the end of the Pain arc. Out of all of that I'd say this game keeps about 10-20% of the scenes in tact. Don't get me wrong, the game is still a good romp through some of the best episodes of the series, but it could have been better. Mostly the lost star on the rating is for this reason. They also edited some scenes and changed some of how they really happened. Hinata's words she says in the Pain battle is a big example of how they cut and edited things.
Story aside, this time you can now go outside of Konoha. Which is great but...Konoha and the world now feels like you are playing in a manga book. You spend all your time on foot going from place to place and it all seems very small compared to how its portrayed in the series. The first Ninja Storm game did Konoha much better. Also missing is some of the funner side missions like jumping through the trees or running up them. Really the game could have had a quick travel system which involved this but sadly this is left out.
Other side missions can vary from either being quite fun to downright stupid. To give an example without spoiling it too much. If you have played Ninja Storm 1, you know the pain some of those hide n seek missions were with Konohamaru. In 2, there is a hide n seek mission but, literally you turn a corner and you can see him just standing with his back to you pretending to be a regular background person...except, theres no one else around him. Really it was the dumbest moment of the entire game. Thankfully thats all I found. As I said, most of the side missions are quite fun and if you don't get them all during the main storyline, don't worry. The game goes into a mission mode after you finish the storyline so you can run around the world anywhere you want and do missions.
This mission mode is a rather nice deal for achievement hunters. Mess up on a fight? No sweat, theres a guy who you can talk to that will allow you to replay them all. You can also form your own perfect 4 man team. This is a great feature vs just going to a menu and selecting missions from that, then going to a location in Konoha to do them. However, the menu will still serve a very important tool during the game so get used to what it provides early on.
Aside from that graphically the game isn't much beyond it's predecessor. Losing the city and the smaller feel to the world do bring down the appeal a little bit, but the world backgrounds are all rather nicely done. Most of which look like backgrounds made for the show itself. I will note that if you are expecting the Xbox version to have better FSAA support than the PS3, don't bother unless you run in lower resolutions. Running at 1650x1080 shows the same old jaggies as the first. This seems to disappear when you put it on a regular TV or lower res but its a shame cause the engine itself is not all that advanced. Xbox does have a better GPU than the PS3 so I was expecting it to be a little better like it usually is.
Rest of the game is well done. Voices and music are cut right from the series which is great...course that would be the Japanese ones. Anyone who watches the show or plays the game in the English dub...you need to be slapped. Just watching the opening movie before you can set the game to Japanese is unbearable enough. Just terrible compared to the Japanese voices. I'm not one to usually say that since there are some shows I do enjoy the English voices in...but Naruto isn't one of them.
In the end, this game is good, its fun, but it could be a lot better and bigger. Merging the strengths from the first game with the strengths from this would really make a phenomenal game. But I doubt we'll really see a Naruto game take off big time till they invest in making a Naruto MMO. If that ever happens, lets hope they take a lot from the Ninja Storm games. Mix that in with the complete Naruto world...it would be unstoppable.
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