Naruto: Rise of a Ninja Exclusive: A Konoha Vacation

Ubisoft Montreal's forthcoming Naruto action game Rise of a Ninja represents a number of firsts for this wildly popular anime-turned-video-game franchise. It's the first time Naruto has appeared on a next-generation console with pretty next-gen visuals. It's also the first time that a major Western developer has tackled the series from the ground up. (Previous Naruto games have been developed in Japan.) Furthermore, it's the first time diehard fans will get to fully explore every inch of Naruto's village of Konoha and its lush surrounding environs. We went hands-on with a nearly finished build of Rise of a Ninja recently to find out just how much gameplay has been packed into those lovingly recreated lands.

As the name implies, Rise of a Ninja covers the beginning of the Naruto anime's storyline--specifically, from episodes 1 to 80. That means you'll spend the course of the game winning over the town's populace as you strive to become the finest ninja Konoha has ever known. It's no wonder the townspeople hate Naruto at the outset--he just happens to be one with the spirit of a nine-tailed fox demon that ravaged Konoha and slew its greatest hero on the night of Naruto's birth, so he's going to have a lot to prove as he trains, does good deeds for the citizenry, and progresses through the storyline.

Rise of a Ninja is essentially an open-world game, in that you can travel almost anywhere without hitting a load screen, and pick up new missions and objectives at your leisure from characters hanging out in the environment. But it also uses a tiered approach à la Metroid, whereby you'll beef up your abilities as you complete specific tasks and story points, and then use those abilities to access more of Konoha and the lands surrounding it than you could before. As you explore, you'll run up against obstacles such as impassable bodies of water, unscalable walls, and immovable boulders. Those barriers will become less and less of a problem as you acquire new abilities that let you walk on water, run up walls, and smash barriers with your mighty little fists.

The game's representation of Konoha itself is, according to the developers, the most complete one yet seen in a game. Ubi Montreal's artists and designers worked from hordes of specific reference material provided by the creators of the original anime to nail the location and appearance of everything from Naruto's corner ramen shop to the faces of the four Hokage carved into the mountainside. It seems as if there's as much to explore vertically as horizontally in Konoha. Once you gain the double-jump ability, you'll be able to scale up most buildings and explore the secrets held on upper floors, as well as gain a bird's-eye view of the village. At that point, you can also access the network of zip lines strung between many of the larger buildings.

In fact, many of the side missions you'll find in Konoha will demand quick and nimble traversal of the city's streets and rooftops. For instance, there are ramen-delivery missions that will require you to haul tail from one hungry customer to the next in a set amount of time. Similarly, hide-and-seek missions will require you to find Konohamaru wherever he's hidden in the town, and often you'll have to climb buildings or leap over fences to discover his latest hiding place. The popularity mechanic we mentioned earlier even factors into city navigation; townspeople who like you will give you a hint as to the location of your next objective by adding a temporary objective arrow to your heads-up display. It lasts only a few seconds, but every little bit helps.

Konoha presents some light platforming challenges, but you'll hit the real meat of the game's traversal mechanics once you get outside of town. In the lands around Konoha, you'll find more treacherous obstacles that require precision timing, jumps, climbing, and so on. For instance, one section had us running across a series of platforms suspended over a river while giant spiked logs swung back and forth across our path. In addition, anytime you move from one area of the outskirts to another, you'll also have to engage in a tree-jumping minigame (seen in past trailers and previews) where you make Naruto leap at high speed from branch to branch, hopefully keeping him from smashing face-first into a trunk.

Did you know that there's also a full-fledged fighting game in here? We can't divulge all the details just yet, but Rise of a Ninja will offer a full versus mode outside the story that's more like past Naruto fighting games. But even within the story itself, the game will find a way to pull its fighting engine into the mix. There aren't any fodder enemies roaming around the wilds outside Konoha that you'll have to fight amidst all this platforming, but you will sometimes get pulled into RPG-style random encounters against generic enemies as you run around outside town. This will drop you into a one-on-one fight with your opponent (a bandit, for instance) in which you'll bring to bear all the same fighting skills you have access to in the main versus mode and in sparring matches against your ninja masters.

You only need to look at the screens and videos for Rise of a Ninja to see how closely Ubi Montreal has nailed the anime-stylized look of the series in high definition, but attention should still be paid to the game's dazzling visuals. The character models combine cel-shading and outlining with bump-mapping to produce the most convincing cartoon-like effect in recent memory. Further, lead artist Sebastien Primeau says the artists achieved the backgrounds' anime-like style by hand-painting nearly every texture in the entire game. A number of notable artists--including Pascal Blanché, whose work has appeared in film and on the splash screen of 3D Studio Max--came out of the woodwork to join the project and help make the game look as close to the anime as possible.

There's a lot more to Naruto: Rise of a Ninja than we're at liberty to discuss just yet. Don't fret--we'll bring you the rest of the details on the fighting mechanics and online play soon. The good news is that the game is basically finished. It has already been submitted to Microsoft for final testing, and is right on schedule to hit its late-October release date. Look for more in the coming weeks.