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.

I eagerly made the trip out to the game store after work yesterday to pick up my copy of Madden 11. After I got home it was almost 30 minutes before I was able to actually play the game. It’s getting sort of ridiculous, I had to enter 2 different 12 character codes before I could even get started, the preorder bonus, and EA’s online pass. On top of that, there is the typical day 1 patch to install. Anyway, this isn’t really a gripe about Madden itself since this short of thing happens for almost every game at this point, but I seriously miss the days of the most time complicated part of playing a game the first time was getting into the packaging.

Anyway, when you get to the main menu, you are punched in the face with ads… Ads as menu items themselves, in fact the default menu items when the game finishes loading are ads. There is also an ad ticker at the bottom of the screen talking about EA DLC for other games (EA’s MMA in this case). I find it disheartening that a game that sells millions of copies annually, feels the need to bolster their revenue by this degree of advertising. I fully understand some product placement, particularly the in game stat stuff that does make things a little closer to the broadcasts, but there is just so much invasive advertising in this game it makes me a little angry.

Take it to the field! I played a few games with the GameFlow turned on, fully understanding that it’s more or less the Ask Madden system with a few out of game functions to give it some customization. This is not as big an innovation as people are making it out to be, in my limited experience thus far, it does seem like it would work well for the people who aren’t well versed in football strategy, or are playing as an unfamiliar playbook. However, when I say go for it on 4th and goal on the 2, I don’t want to see the wildcat formation, ever, worst part is in that scenario you can’t even audible out of the play because you don’t have the right personal on the field. And as an Eagles fan (a team that makes no qualms about being a very pass heavy team), I could tell that the default settings for my team were wrong. GameFlow had me running primarily, and 20 or so plays out of the wildcat, for the course of both games.

I think that leads well into my biggest complaint about the game, it lacks polish. Sure, there are lots of production values, and things going on in the course of the game that are good, when I think of polish, I’m talking about the extra effort that goes into the game to make each and every one of those things works flawlessly, that doesn’t exist here. There are obvious problems with the audio stitching in all areas of the game (ingame, pregame, postgame), which is understandable to a degree because of the volume dialog that exists but the frequency of it is nearly unacceptable. Also, hearing Cris Colinsworth goin on about the importance the first preseason game, and the experience of the 2 quarterbacks despite the fact that one of them is going into his first season as a starter and simply doesn’t have the experience he’s talking about. I don’t think this was nearly as bad in seasons past.

Also, the game crashed twice on me last night requiring a hard restart of the playstation. It happened once trying to load a Madden Moment (returning from last year, basically some game scenarios from last season that you try to recreate, or overturn, in the time remaining), they are decent if you don’t have time to play a whole game. And once while I was playing in the ‘be a superstar’ mode, which you basically play as a rookie and try run the plays that are called and win games. Because your player isn’t on the field at all times, you have the ability to simulate the game until the next time your player is on the field, that’s when the game crashed on me. It’s disappointing too because I was into my second game, and I forgot to save between them, so I may have to start over entirely, can I get an auto-save system please? Playing this mode was really fun though, I even liked running routes as a receiver, and even blocking on sweeps is fun.

I really think all of these could be resolved with the polish I mentioned above, I truly believe that this game is a victim of an annual, ridged release schedule, and will never ever be the perfect game it has had the potential to be as they continue to add features or outright change functionally. Because once you get into the games, most of those complaints are nullified by an excellent game of football. I’ve been loving the offense in this year’s offering. The line-aware receivers is incredible, I’ve yet to see a receiver take it out of bounds (I’m sure it will happen occasionally though), and the running game without the turbo button is great, i’m really liking the light tilts on the analog while the blocks set up, it really does feel like a burst when you push it down all the way to change direction, or hit the hole… this is easily the most fun I’ve had with the madden running game.  Defense feels the same as always, but they added a defense assist, while, holding ‘X’ your player will execute the play like he should until you let go, I find it handy when I’m playing off the line, so the player stays on him man when he makes cuts in man-to-man or gets to his zone in zone coverage, hopefully it’ll have me controlling something other than a lineman or a blitzer every play.

They changed the pre-snap controls, so it’s taking a while to adjust to the new system, but it appears to work, however it feels like there is less time to use it before the snap than in previous years.

It’s sort of annoying though when they say, we’re trying to make it a faster experience and have the games take less time, but there is all these “broadcast-like” things before during and after the game, that take more time than anything else. Anyway, its’ still fun, and I’ll be playing the hell out of it, and you shouldn’t let all these gripes effect your decision, since the football part of the football game really is excellent.