"Final Fantasy Rippoff with Ninjas..."

...quite a disappointing game.

Graphics: 5/10

The sprite design and character animation is very poor; during scenes the characters have almost no animation whatsoever. They haven't even bothered making sprites for when Naruto runs; he just walks twice as fast. It's pretty laughable. This is probably the worst looking of the Naruto GBA games I've seen so far. The character art that appears next to names and when doing special moves in battle is decent though.

Backgrounds are pretty bad too; you get sick of forests very quickly. They're very monotonous and easy to get lost in, because let's face it: everything looks the same. Konoha villiage is decent though; it's always fun to be able to wander around in it.

Gameplay: 4/10

The battles system is a total Final Fantasy rippoff; it's just your standard rpg. Everything from the 'front row, back row' system, to elemental magic... *cough*, I mean 'jutsu'. The character's individual skills are fine (Kagebunshin, Sharingan, etc), but then you get all of these elemental hit-all scrolls, and healing scrolls which really don't fit.

One neat thing is that characters will attack together sometimes to do extra damage, depending on how much they like each other.

An annoying thing is that you can only hold up to 40 items at a time; the rest you can send to a storage area. But you get a lot of items from battle, and you're continously needing to use or throw away items to make room.

There are a few cute elements; during the Zabusa & Haku arc, you have Kakashi on your team, who doesn't let you control his movements. He either attacks for munchkin-y damage or sits there happily reading Itacha-itacha-violence. Annoying, but so in character that they're entirely forgiven for that.

Story: 7.5/10

It's the normal Naruto plot with a few extra missions and scenes altered. For those with a good knowledge of Japanese, you'll notice the dialogue's been censored; "Kill" is now "defeat", and "dead" is "unconscious". A little annoying.

Music: 5

Nothing starting; it gets annoying and repetitive after a while. But at least they tried to get a "Naruto" like style to it.

Overall: 6

...probably a bit generous. Non Naruto fans will most likely not enjoy this game, and even those who are fans will probably find this game tedious.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 06/15/05