Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Hard to describe"

WARNING: This review may spoil not just parts from the game, but from the Naruto series in general.


Last time, we saw Naruto as a twelve year old ninja student slowly maturing from prankster who doesn't do well in school, to a person willing to defend the people he cares about. Now in the latest Naruto saga, Naruto Shippuden, he has grown up into an older teenager after three years of special training with Jiraiya, who is one of the Sannin. He may still have his immature moments, but by time, you can tell he's growing up.

But enough about talking about the series in general, let's talk about the first Ultimate Ninja game set in the Shippuden saga, known as Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja 4 for the PS2.

The game's story starts in a non-canon chapter where Naruto and Jiraiya stop by this town not far from the Hidden Leaf Village is cursed by a beast which lives in the mines near the town. Naruto hears of a little girl willing to sacrifice herself in these mines, but he doesn't like the idea and goes into the mines to stop her and kill the beast who curses the town.

After that, he heads back home to the Leaf Village with Jiraiya (where the saga truly starts), reunites with some old friends, and gets an assignment to go rescue an old rival of his he met in the Chunin Exams, named Gaara.

The storyline in the Shippuden is run by a third-person adventure mode known as "Master Mode," in this mode, you control as Naruto as you wander through the Land of Fire and the Land of the Wind (where the desert is located). There, Naruto also gets involved in fights with other random ninja not seen in the anime or manga, but not in the same format the Ultimate Ninja games had. In fact, it's FAR different. It resembles more of a 3D beat 'em up more than anything. And most of that combat is run by button mashing that lacks a LOT of depth. There will be times during these brawls when Naruto will pull off some awesome jutsu that's NOT his "Rasengan," (you can hit that anytime) but that'll be when the Triangle button pops up and tells you to press the button. This happens quite frequently. And like open world-esque games, you get to do secondary objectives. And there will be chances to do the traditional fighting the Ultimate Ninja PS2 series has had since the beginning.

About the secondary objectives, hardly any of them are fun. The only fun ones in the game involve the main fighting in the series, and even part of the event of that makes no sense. You'll see mysterious characters disguised as characters from the Naruto series (all the characters they are disguised as are unlockable and playable) whether they would be the younger versions of the ones who did grow up, (which makes no sense), characters who died (also doesn't make sense), and characters who are living during the timeline UN4 is based on. A lot of these other sidequests are composed of fetch quests or delivery quests, all of them aren't that fun.

Another single player mode is called "Hero Mode." In this mode, you get to experience the storyline in the classic Naruto series (back when they were twelve to thirteen year old kids) from confronting Haku and Zabuza to the betrayal of Sasuke. But to fully do that, you must get ALL of these orbs known as "Piece of Memory," which are found all over certain maps in "Master Mode," and all those are used for are dialog segments which just have a picture of the characters, a scrolling narrative for that character, and characters talking either to each other, or themselves. These scenes cost one "Piece of Memory" each, but the scenes where you do fights are also rare like in "Master Mode."

But without these modes, you wouldn't be able to unlock characters for the fighting gameplay modes, so some good does come out of them there.

But where the game should be mainly focused on is the main fighting, and as I said, is as fun as in previous Naruto: Ultimate Ninja games. You still have the good controls, the decent fighting system, and you still got the multiplayer, which is quite important for a fighting game. And when you do get single player fights in "Hero" and "Master Modes", you do get very challenging fights and in fighting games, they are exactly needed more than a dull adventure mode. And what's still great about the regular fighting gameplay is that most of everything is kept intact, like the game is still in the same 2.5D plane with stages that have multiple parts to them. You can still get cinematics for when a character pulls off an Ultimate move (which you can still do by pressing the Triangle button and then attacking your enemy with Circle), and hit the right buttons fast enough to either make sure your move is pulled off correctly, or by stopping your enemies ultimate move, which still is a lot of fun to do as it can either deal a lot of damage or prevent any massive damage.

The graphics in the game got a major change. In the previous three Ultimate Ninja games for PS2, the art style resembled the manga series. In Ultimate Ninja 4, they change that to cel-shading similar to Tomy and Eighting's Clash of Ninja series on Nintendo's Gamecube and Wii, and later used in CyberConnect2's Ultimate Ninja Storm series for the PS3 and XBOX 360. And they look quite nice for the most part, the only thing that kind of disrupted them is seeing jagged lines, which are on most of the characters, but the environments look great.

The controls, whether they are in fighting or the adventure mode are ok. There really isn't much to say about them for the adventure mode (since I already brought them up), but in fighting the controls are solid as they feel very responsive and are still quite comfortable.

Like the anime series, Ultimate Ninja 4 does a well done job with the music, which blends a bit of rock and roll with far-eastern instruments, it is all beautifully blended together. And the sound effects still capture that feel of the anime series.

Overall, Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja 4 disappoints with the lack of single player fights, dull adventure mode, a waste of a flashback story. But the multiplayer fights and the rare single player fights are still very fun.