Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm 2

I’ve brought up in the past that I’m a fan of the Naruto anime and manga, and I even enjoyed many of the other video games in the series. After playing the demo for Ultimate Ninja Storm 2 I was actually really excited to pick it up, it seemed like they made some subtle changes to the combat that would really change the way it’s played in the context of story fights anyway, not really free play or online, mostly because of the fight in the demo involved a lot of moving to avoid jutsu and that was really fun.

All that said, my biggest concern for the game was going to be how they handled the story mode, lets be honest here, no one on my friends list is going to be picking this game up and I don’t blame them. So to me, the big draw is the story mode. As I mentioned it is a story I’m intimately familiar with and quite frankly very invested in, the series is at episode 400 or so between the original series and shippuden and the manga is beyond chapter 500. And here is one of my biggest problems with the game so far, it doesn’t do a good job in telling that story to players who may not be familiar with the content. I’ve played through the end of chapter 1, which is the end of the Save the Kazekage story arc, and it did include all the key points and moments but there is a lot of subtlety that I found important that were left out. Admittedly catching a player up on 200+ episodes is not really an option, and they do try to do back-story pieces during the battles by way of a reward for doing well in the quick time events in certain story moments. I did notice a few issues with some of these flashbacks though, one example is when they show a moment between Sasuke and Itachi after Itachi killed their entire family. Itachi was wearing his Akatsuki robes, he wasn’t when that happened in the story that wasn’t the case. I can certainly understand why that would be an appropriate thing to do to help relate the characters to people not familiar with the story because Itachi ~is~ wearing the robes for the duration of the story told in UNS2. So while I can understand why they would do it, it would appear that they are trying to cater to both side, and you know what, I’m fine with that, but I think by making some of the important back stories a reward you are potentially taking that content away from a player who may not know it and to me, that’s a mistake. There is a TON of content here though, I think I’m almost 5 hours in, and I’ve barely scratched the surface of the story if the game truly goes out to the end of the Pain Saga, a lot to see.

Now, on top of the story telling itself, and I’d imagine in response to the outcry about how terrible the hub world aspect of the original Ultimate Ninja Storm game, here’s what they did… they changed the sandbox style Konaha with a JRPG LINEAR, SMALL ROOM, Final Fantasy XII style, you know what everyone’s complaint about FFXIII was? yea, exactly… Here’s a note to cyberconnect2, the problem with Ultimate Ninja Storm wasn’t the sandbox mode itself in fact running around Konaha was actually fairly fun, it was all the stupid shit that you had to do in the sandbox mode, the millions of collectibles, the order lists where you had to find combinations of items to unlock certain things. Guess what, most of that stupid shit is still here. So, while it did give them an opportunity to expand the environment beyond the Konaha walls, which I think is important, you get to see the sand village and the route to the sand village etc, but it’s not fun traversal at all. Your team walks slowly, they don’t use the ninja tree travel at all “we’re in a hurry!”, then proceed to walk slowly doesn’t make much sense.

In any case, the combat is mostly the same, I haven’t run into too much of fancy jutsu stuff that I was looking forward too from the demo since, but it’s still pretty early so I’m not going to make a judgement on that yet. Still a lot of fast paced good looking action though with some quick time events mixed in at the end. It’s still really fun to play when you’re actually in combat, I just wish they had some sense when it came to the story mode. I’ll likely finish this one, and I’d probably still recommend it to fans, it’s really an opportunity to revisit the story without watching all the episodes again, especially since the fan can likely fill in the blanks on their own.