Hokage's Room

We give, Naruto: Ultimate Ninja 2, an 8 Out Of 10!

Ultimate Ninja 2 is the work of Cyber Connect2, a Japanese team with some street cred tracing back to the PlayStation adventure Tail Concerto. Its games have historically been a cut above Bandai's usual -- Silent Bomber is another example, and the .hack dungeon crawls. Not A-list games, but solid work, with a touch of individuality that showed they weren't just grimly shoved down the assembly line. Here CC2 proves it can do a lot of things well, but designing a fighting game isn't one of them yet. It might have seemed like a good idea at the time, but Ultimate Ninja 2, like the first installment, mixes two kinds of fighter that weren't ever meant to work together. On the one hand, you have the simple controls and flashy special moves from something like Smash Brothers, or the GameCube Ultimate Muscle games. On the other hand, despite attempts to give them depth and interactivity, the stages are still more like a straight 2D fighter's than the free-roaming playfields of a good, all-action brawling game. You can hop back and forth between a couple of different planes, but there's no free movement along a third axis. The real killer, though, is it's a two-player game. This kind of fighter works best with four people on a couch throwing elbows and getting popcorn stuck between the cushions. The four-player GameCube Naruto games succeed for exactly that reason. Boil it down to a simple head-to-head game and the limited controls kill it dead. The reason Ultimate Ninja 2 receives an 8 out of 10 is for the simple fact that it’s the best Naruto installment for the PlayStation thus far. It has more depth then Ultimate Ninja and an all-new mode, Ultimate Road, which allows players to play through the storyline; while earning points to customize their character’s parameters of their choice, and unlock an original storyline as more of the Naruto saga unfolds. New and fun mini-games are also a plus, but some are guarantied to frustrate you. With a vast amount of unlockable features such as playable characters, movies, music, collectible cards, and more; Naruto fans will be busy till the release of Ultimate Ninja 3. "It's got problems, but fans of the license will still enjoy it." This is one of the oldest cop-out lines in the business, almost as old as bad licensed games period. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that it's usually true, too -- more often than it isn't, anyway. Consider the platinum sales of all those Dragon Ball Z games, most of which were much, much worse than Ultimate Ninja 2. Fans of a license like this deserve better, though. Whether or not you like the Naruto cartoons, you have to admit that they're pretty great fighting-game fodder -- bright, violent, over-the-top action. We'll have to wait, see, and hope if Bandai gets it right the next time. Article by: DragonslayDeathSquad (Konohamaru) With Thanks to: D. F. Smith and X-Play

Ninja Dream Team - Mission 22

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Shino, Hinata, and Shikamaru is my dream team. I know Shino and Hinata are in the same group, but they work real well togeather since both of them basicaly have the same personality and great potentional. Shikamaru tops this team off with his "such a drag" attitude and Shadow Possetion jutsu.

Posted Aug 13, 2007 by Konohamaru | Share It

Filed under: dream team

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