Not A Naruto Fan, But Pleasantly Suprised.
Let me start by saying that you don't need to know Naruto to play this game (which is lucky for me), as the game plays through the Naruto story covering the first 80 episodes. I have read various reviews saying that this game is not likeable unless you like Naruto, but personally the problem I always had with both Dragonball Z and Naruto was that you could sum up the plot of every episode in one sentence (Goku charges up to 1 million points, Naruto summons a giant frog), I mean let's face it, each episode has a couple of cool action sequences followed by other characters needlessly summarising the sitiuation and that's where this game improves on that. There's no explaining, just doing and the story doesn't suffer for it. Sure we're probably missing out on some things, but you can get the gist of it from playing the game.
Now the gameplay is a mish mash of different gaming elements, you have a well executed Jak-style sandbox city where you can partake in various mini games, you develop your character as if it were an RPG and the combat much like RPGs involve random encounters but are in the form of a fighting game. This kind of sounds like they're trying to satisfy everyone and that it would easily confuse itself and become unplayable, but strangely enough, it works! So let's look at each one seperately and see why.
Let's start with exploring Konoha village. It's your main base in the game and probably the place where you'll spend most of your time. It's an open city which you're free to explore and undertake various mini-games such as street races, hide and seek and Ramen delivery. Every mini game has a simple to play control system, have varying degrees of difficulty and are all very addictive, each one helping to improve your character and make money to spend in the various shops around Konoha, it is very easy to waste hours exploring every nook and cranny of this well rendered environment. As I mentioned before these mini-games help to improve your character, whether it's skill points to develop combos and abilities, money for scrolls to enhance Naruto in combat or building your health and chakra metres, it's all pretty basic stuff by gaming standards today. The beat'em up style battle system can be a bit overwhelming at first and the combo system feels a little unresponsive at times and can even feel a little cheap, but the hand sign addition for Jutsu attacks is very well implemented and very imaginative and perks up what is in essence a rather stale combat system.
The graphics in the game capture the series well and the environments look amazing, it makes it hard to batter this game down for being a rather mediocre TV series and despite the rather testing battle system, it's hard not to find something to like about this game, the one draw back is that this game wreaks of setting up the same game as a sequel, so expect to see little improvement game wise when the sequel comes out -- which is today in the UK -- that said, does it really need to be changed that much? I mean the purpose is to tell the story, so if they've got a system that they feel works, why not?