"Welcome to 10 years ago"

To all those readers that were around in the times of the SNES, the basic premise of this game is simple: complete it several times, under certain conditions, and you'll unlock new content. However, more than 10 years have passed from those times, and a more keen eye may notice that this is one of those games based in an anime series.


Such relationship should be quite obvious if one gave a look to the Story Mode, but it isn't. By picking such option, available in the main menu, the player is taken across a generic storyline, with set opponents, which is possible to complete in a matter of minutes and bears Uzumaki Naruto as the only controllable character. Either if you're playing its simple version, or you try to increase the difficulty of the mode (the only tuning option available in the game), the time spent here hardly amuses a player, being nothing more than a pathetic excuse used to claim that the game has a story mode, after all.

Predictably, the other modes are nothing special, either. The game contains the usual Arcade and Vs. modes: the first, allows a selected character to fight against a set number of random opponents (with his/her health being filled after each round), turning the experience into something slightly more interesting than what you face in the Story mode; when it comes to Vs. modes, you can either set a battle between 2 selected characters (let's face it, that's an option that players barely use) or fight against other human players, via wireless, all of whom are required to have a copy of this cart.

This absence of interesting, or innovative, gameplay options could be ignored if the fighting portion of the game was actually good, but such possibility is not exactly true. Instead, the player is presented with a pretty generic 3D interface, where a character can circle around the opponent, apart from approaching or moving away from that current foe. That's nothing new, several games used this very same formula in the past, and while each character seems unique in their way to perform combos, they don't exactly feel like characters from
the famous Japanese series: each of them presents the player with a single special attack, taken from the series, and which always causes a set amount of damage, independently of who they are or what attack they performed. If you ever saw the series, you know that those attacks don't really work like depicted in the game.

Apart from such minor detail, if it wasn't for the way that the characters look like, there wouldn't even be any way to figure out that this was a game based in the famous Naruto series.

Surprisingly, the people who brought us this game actually added something interesting to the product: while in battle, the lower screen shows up to 6 items, which are randomly awarded before the fighting starts. While the addition of these items, which range from healing ones up to ones that cause special effects, could seem nice and add a strategical component to the game, it just turns out being being unimportant, since the possibility of being awarded each of them is random. You may face battles where you have 5 healing items, and others where none of those will be seen.

After a while, players will find themselves to be constantly mashing the attack buttons, while disregarding more defensive techniques, for the sole reason that they work very well, against most opponents. Due to such issues, most players will get quickly bored with the game, and the lack of options (in every sense) largely contributes to that. There are 6 secret characters to unveil, which join the initial rooster of the 7 most popular ones (Naruto, Sakura, Rock Lee, Sasuke and 3 others), and nothing else to fight for.

Graphics aren't going to save this game, either. Despite being 3D and allowing most players to easily recognise their heroes, they are not very detailed and remind me of middle age Playstation titles, such as "Tekken 2". The image is usually grainy and some special attacks are poorly made, even showing some clear graphical glitches.

The sound is not perfect, but worth mentioning, since it allows a player to hear some good tunes, most of which seem to have been taken from the series. The sound effects, along with the voices of the character, are nicely heard and properly fit the game.


Clearly, this is a title that simply tries to make some money out of the Naruto franchise. With certain improvements, it could be a nice title, but right now it seems to be a title that only collectors of Naruto merchandise, or hardcore fans, may want to purchase, no matter what version of the game you see in front of you.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 12/18/06, Updated 01/14/08

Game Release: Naruto: Shinobi Retsuden (JP, 12/14/06)