Generations suffers from a surprising lack of an essential story mode, poor art and a general sense of pointlessness.

User Rating: 5 | Naruto Shippuden: Narutimate Storm Generation PS3
Ultimate Ninja Storm: Generations does not live up to the quality and game play of its predecessors. I feel generous giving UNS:G a 5/10...I think my love and appreciation for the past few games in the series made me automatically more forgiving in my review. But besides some improvement in gameplay, the fluidity of characters in the story and free battle, everything about the game bothered me.

By no means are Generation's graphics or gameplay awful. Comparing this to Ultimate Ninja Storm 2's graphics and gameplay, the player can sense that makers tried to make the way characters move even more fluid and realistic, though they aimed a bit high. This ended up creating some issues with gameplay that made it difficult for one to successfully strike a target due to very 'loose' movement. What truly makes Generation disappointing, though, is summed up in a few points:

1. Makers of the game completely went an alternate route with generations, opting to let the game be a boring, terribly narrated (IMO) storybook style of events with different key characters having a separate 'tale' which unlocks over 70 characters. Yes, this means that unlike EVERY Naruto game in this series before, Generations won't allow you to move around as Naruto and explore villages in a side story mode. Instead, we get a few key scenes shown in drawings presented with a watercolor blur that's reminiscent of an effect in PowerPoint.

Unlocking characters through playing the main story is nothing new; but nixing the essential story mode where characters are allowed to traverse different villages while actually in control of Naruto, Sasuke or another character absolutely bumped this game's score down by a few points.
The creators could have easily worked on improving the old story mode for this game, but, as I've suspected since it's more than obvious, they didn't wanna spend the green and the time for it.

2. Another key issue was the style of the storybook-like feature, besides the lack of story mode and being able to control characters to discover different items and worlds. The story book style had, as aforementioned, awful narrations that are excessive and boring. But worst of all is the way we have already PLAYED MOST OF THESE BATTLES in ULTIMATE STORM 2! Go through Generations and you will find frustratingly similar stories, backgrounds and fights, but with crappy narration and very easy difficulty throughout, and no sustenance to the plot. The Itachi tale, for example, has few interesting story lines, and most of them we have already played if you have gone through Storm 2.

3. I balked at the way the creators unashamedly yanked 70% of their material from Storm 2. It made me wonder exactly - WHAT is this game FOR? Is it for the 70 characters when only 25-30 were accessible in Storm 2? Is it merely to be able to play Sasuke's new arc in Shippuden fighting the 5 Kage (which predictably, is a very small part of the arc, and not nearly in depth enough or as intense as one is lead to believe)?

3.5 As an important 1/2 point, or extra, I'd like to mention something else significant that rubbed me the wrong way: the HORRIBLE ART IN THE GAME. I can't stress enough how disappointed I was, comparing the 'vs' screen's art and the character concept art in the game, to Storm 2's. It made me almost convinced that this game had a pretty low budget and little meticulousness or care injected into creating the art. Sasuke doesn't look like Sasuke - he's a fan artist's version, and so is Naruto. Many of the characters lack the key drawing style of Kishimoto, and I wonder if this is because, ***the creators did not want to spend a lot of money on a game that's unimportant compared to Storm 3 coming out soon.****


4. Also, the weird substitution method in this game irked me... you get a set number of substitutions you're allowed to use when pressing the controls, and if you run out, well then, good luck. In Storm 2, at least subs could be accessible at all times with adequate chakra.

All in All - this game is pointless! That is the key flaw to Generations. Even though the gameplay improved to a degree, I saw nothing SPECIAL in this new installment. To me, it seems like it was an intermediate game between Storm 2 and Storm 3. It made no sense.