Naruto: Ultimate Ninja 2

"When an unstoppable force meets an immovable object, the result is Kabuto"

Naruto: Ultimate Ninja 2 hits American shores while the Naruto craze continues to sweep across the nation. This highly anticipated, button-mashing title by CyberConnect2 is the sequel to Naruto: Ultimate Ninja and improves on every possible aspect of the game. The character roster boosts over 30 playable characters from the hit manga and 16 unique stages! With graphics that look like it was pulled straight from the manga and solid game play, this game is truly something to be proud about.

Unlike every other Naruto game to reach American stores, Naruto: Ultimate Ninja 2 actually has a story line that is more than character face cut-outs and dialog. Even more frightening, the story follows the current Naruto anime quite accurately. Most of the time spent on this game will be in this story, or Ultimate Road mode. The story starts out right where Naruto: Ultimate Ninja ended, which is surprising because I expected another boring rehash of the Haku/Zabuza arc. The first half of the story goes from the chunin exams all the way to the conclusion of the Tsunade arc. In the second half of the story, you will get to enjoy an entirely original story line that has nothing to do with the actual anime or manga. I'm sure that this original part will raise some eyebrows, but hey, the developers need some excuse to bring back Haku and Zabuza. It's strange though, they bring back the Third Hokage at random times!

The actual fighting is quite similar to the first game in the series. Battles are all one on one, but each fighter has a supporting character, who will randomly appear on the battlefield and drop an item for use. Battles take place on stages that have a foreground and background, and you can switch between planes with the push of a button. The environment has destructible items like boxes that can be broken into to. They will yield items like kunai and chakra/health restoring items. This game has more weapons to choose from compared to the previous games, as you can find cool items like timed paper bombs, exploding kunai, and more! Other aspects of battle haven't changed, including throws, combos, blocking, and substitution jutsus. By the way, you can now perform a throw in the air. The combos have remain unchanged, so people familiar with the first Ultimate Ninja get feel at home here. Characters can climb on walls as well in this game, and can stand on water at the cost of chakra. Characters have a chakra bar that can be increased by holding down on the control pad. Timing is crucial in this game, because you will often need to substitute out of enemy combos and finish off battles quickly with special attacks.

The most important and coolest part of battle is the special attacks. Often times, winners and losers of battles are determined by who can pull off the most specials. By pressing the triangle button 1-3 times, your character will be surrounded by different colored chakra. The special you pull off depends on that color (red, purple, or blue). Keep in mind though, that you have to hit the enemy in order to trigger the special, and the enemy often blocks that hit. In the previous game, the damage done depends on whether a player can accurately input a sequence of buttons. If done correctly, the special will continue or deal critical damage. The victim of the special can input buttons as well to reduce the damage. In this game, however, you do more than just entering buttons. Certain specials will have you rotating the analog stick like crazy, while others will have you mashing a particular button. In fact, much of this game is just button mashing.

There are more status effects characters can have. Such status effects include the familiar Sharingan, the Byakugan, and the Gates. These effects often activate as a result of some special. Other ordinary status effects like speed up, speed down, defense up, defense down, and the such are all here too. There are several more cool effects that you will find throughout the game, and some of them are really cheap.

Ultimate Road is the biggest change to the series. This mode is a really interactive story mode which will span through four chapters. The first two chapters will go up to the end of the Tsunade arc while the last two chapters feature an original story. The game will let you run around Konoha, the Land of the Waves, Tanzaku Town, and The Hidden Village of Sand as Naruto. You can explore various parts of these places and talk to many people while you are at it. This actually has elements of an RPG game, because there are side quests, shops, and more. After conclusion of the four chapters, you can still run around in Ultimate Road mode, completing missions, earning jutsus, or playing mini games.

You can play various mini games like Lee's push-up contest and Shikamaru's Shadow Pose Challenge. These games are nothing more than obstacle courses, mashing a button as many times as possible in 10 seconds, and memorizing sequences of buttons. Not really fun, but a good source of income! This is the part that will really make your hands tired. Winning these games require nimble fingers and fast reflexes. If you are the gambling type, you can play on a slot machine which cheats I think.

Another new element is the ability to customize your character. By fighting through the story mode and completing missions, you earn experience points for your characters. The character you use to win a battle will earn experience. You will also gain 10% of that experience for other characters. For example, if some mission awards 120 experience to one character, all of your other characters will gain 12 exp. You can use these points to increase a character's attacks, defense, chakra regain speed, and more. Be careful how you spend your points, because the max experience allowed is 9,999. After that, you can't gain any more experience, but you can reset them for a certain price. You must improve your characters if you want to make it through the story mode in one piece. You gain the power to customize more characters as you progress through the game. Even cooler is the ability to customize the two jutsus each character is allowed to use. As you earn jutsus from various characters throughout the mode, you will have so much from using stolen jutsus. Any character can learn any jutsu within reason, like Rock Lee can't learn Ninjutsu, for example. Personally, every character I use must have Hinata's Medicine jutsu, which will give random positive status effects and restore health for only a little chakra. This allows character's who can't heal themselves normally to do so!

Another feature of this mode is to complete missions, from S to D ranked. You sign up for a mission and then you go to some place to meet your client as start the mission. As you move up in rank, the conditions for victory become more problematic and difficult. Sometimes, all the conditions will discourage you from even taking the mission. You can abandon a mission before you start to pick something more manageable. Higher missions will reward more experience and ryo, but sometimes they may not be worth the trouble. You can complete an easy mission as many times as you want. Unlike the first Ultimate Ninja, you don't have to beat every mission in one category to unlock the next highest ranked missions.

The story mode is much harder here than any Naruto game I can think of. As you get into chapters three and four, you may have to repeat a battle multiple times to meet all the annoying conditions. The computer AI is much improved, but possibly improved too much. The AI will block like 60% of the time, and use substitution jutsus 30% of the time. This leads to lengthy battles and frustration. You controller will need a cushion for the many times you will slam it down in frustration. Speaking of frustration, I need to talk about Kabuto for a moment. In Ultimate Road mode, this guy is more of an ass than anyone else. He blocks so much that you can't land a special, substitutes so much that you can't string one combo together, and has automatic health restoration. Yes, you read that right. He regains health for free and rather quick intervals. As the steel wall that blocks progress, you'll dread fighting this guy the five times you meet him in the story and break into tears once or twice. The story mode battles make the mission difficulty look like a joke.

Besides the Ultimate Road mode, there is an enhanced practice mode, now renamed "Iruka's Training". You can set the AI to be manual, stand, or fight. You can easily adjust difficulty and other practice settings. I like the fact that you can make the AI just use single hits or just combos. Such options add to the flexibility of the mode and will let you hone your skills with comfort NOT FOUND in the Ultimate Road mode.

There is also a shopping mode that has tremendously improved. In the previous game, you had to buy every figure, sound, and Ninja Info Card individually from a capsule machine. In essence, you had to unlock every single item individually and you can get empty capsules and useless power up items. Now that is gone, thank goodness. You'll see that the shop is much more reasonable now because the developers probably had complaints from the players the first time around, although it still costs a lot of ryo. Overall, the game play has improved in every possible way, although it is really frustrating at times.

The graphics are really good because they look exactly like they do in the manga. The characters are shaded to like copies of themselves from the manga. The special techniques, although short, are probably the best graphics in the game. Each character has three specials, so there are so many great moves to see! Signature skills of various characters come to life, and I must say that they are extremely well done. The character model's are well done because you can see the various details on the character's, like Kisame's Samehada and Kakashi's vest. Japanese text will flash across the screen like a comic when punches are thrown and whatnot.

The battles stages look really good as well. I thought that some of the forest environments looked realistic. Lakes and other types of water look pretty good as well, especially when you see the chakra flowing out from a character's feet. There are actually some beautiful scenes. Take the Great Naruto Bridge, for example. That place always has a very nice sunset with an orange sky. Other parts of the game's environment are active as well, like this cool huge snake which roams in the background of the Forest of Death.

The sound is not that impressive, but still above average. I say this because all the dialog in the Ultimate Road mode is voiced. This is really surprising, because even the NPC's will voice stuff when you talk to them. Think of all the effort it takes to voice everything that every character says. The voice acting is not just read from a script, but I felt that there was some degree of emotion and life to it. I think they got the right voice actors for most of the characters, with only a few that I'm not sure of.

The sound effects are cool, like the explosion of a paper bomb and punches/kicks. The sound of character's running and getting thrown across the screen is decent. I especially like the voice acting and sound effects during a special technique, because those are perfectly done and some specials are hilarious to watch.

The music is the detriment to this category. I don't know if I just tuned it out, but it was never anything pleasant to hear. It's just standard battle music with no strong beat. Unlike the first Ultimate Ninja, the opening sequence is not the same as the anime and is something original instead.

The play time is really long, due to the deep Ultimate Road mode and many missions. Just going through the story mode and collecting all the jutsus can take something like 15 hours. Completing every mission, unlocking every jutsu, and buying out the shop will take to many uncountable hours that only a perfectionist would bother going through. Some of this time will be spent chewing on your controller in frustration because the missions have insane requirements.

The replay value is high, especially with a large cast of characters including the three Sannin and two Akatsuki members. It never gets old to mop the floor with enemies with Itachi. This is also a fine game to bring out when friends are over. Because the controls are relatively simple, any beginner can pick it up with ease.

I recommend that you pick up this game as soon as you can, because it is the current best Naruto based game available now. C'mon, you can play as Itachi! That alone is a very strong reason why this game is amazing. Nothing makes me happier than playing as the men with black cloaks and red clouds. Just remember to eat and sleep because this game will suck up so much time that you will forget that you have a life.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 06/15/07