Ubisoft Naruto Rise of a Ninja Fan Event

On Friday I attended a Naruto fan event with some members of my anime club that was held at Ubisoft’s San Francisco office to celebrate the upcoming release of “Naruto: Rise of a Ninja” for Xbox 360. It’s the first game in the franchise to be developed by a non-Japanese studio and we got to play the game with other fans, eat some snacks, and later go out to dinner with some of the employees. After playing a couple hours of it, I think it’s a pretty solid game.

The action was moving too fast for my older camera.

I started off playing the two-player versus mode and there were about 11 characters to select from at the beginning: Naruto, Sasuke, Sakura, Neji, Kakashi, Rock Lee, Gaara, Kiba, Haku, Zabuza, and Orochimaru. I was told that Konohamaru would be offered as a free download and I imagine there will likely be some additional unlockable characters seeing as Shikamaru, Ino, Temari, and Third Hokage are missing at the start.

The one-on-one gameplay includes regular button combos as well as jutsus that are summoned by holding down the left trigger and moving the control sticks in two pairs of directions (like UP-UP, DOWN-DOWN), then waiting for an expanding circle to reach one of three level arcs to release the trigger. Almost every character has at least two jutsu moves and a few like Sasuke have three at their disposal.

A successful activation launches an interactive cutscene mini-game wherein both players have to execute quick timed button presses in order to block or land attacks depending on who is doing which. There was another form of the mini-game where you try to mash the same button as fast as you can to, if defending, fend off or reduce the effect of the attack or do the obverse if attacking. There is a strategy in when you choose to summon a jutsu because your character stands still while charging it and is vulnerable to being attacked, which will break your energy buildup.

I’ve got 16 smiles, only 234 to go!

The main attraction is the story mode, which has you playing as the orange-jacketed ninja through the first 80 episodes of the anime. You begin with everyone in the village hating you but you can do missions such as finding 25 ancient coins (which can be found on awnings you can jump up to or by destroying trash cans) to help the ramen shop owner open his doors that also gradually help your popularity grow. Getting people to like you is useful since they will give tips of where to go on your village missions and haters will tell you to “find it yourself” or some other snide uncaring remark. One great feature is the freedom to explore the large environment and manipulate the camera angle as you wish, which allowed me to see little details like a kid’s drawing on a wooden fence and an funny ice cream shop sign.

The fights that you encounter in story mode have that same look and feel as the versus fights. During them, you use Memo Clips that you collect through the course of playing the game and can use these short inspirational talking head sequences to give Naruto a health boost when he’s really low in a battle. There are also interesting mini-games related to other story elements. For example, when you retrieve the forbidden scroll like Naruto did in episode 1, you have to race back to Mizuki and hit timed checkpoints along the way. There is a similar one where you moving the control stick so you land at a checkpoint while leaping from tree branch to tree branch in the forest and learning how to climb trees is learned through timed jumps.

The posable Sam Fisher in the lobby

I do have some minor complaints about the game to go with the accolades. When you start out in story mode, you can walk to places but can’t particularly run – something that makes returning to your mission start points somewhat tedious. One of the PR people told me that there is a sprint ability you can acquire later but it would have been nice to have it to begin with. I suppose I could have jumped onto the ropes that hang between various buildings and slid on those like riding a skateboard but I had a bit of trouble at first so that might have been something I’d be able to do easily if I had more time. Also: the 360 degree camera sometimes had the same kind of see-through wall problem when rotating the camera while standing next to a building that you would see in other open-world games – not the biggest problem but still something I noticed while playing.

Overall everyone seemed to have a really fun time playing the game and eating at Nama, a nearby Japanese restaurant, with the Ubisoft people. I would probably buy it if I had a 360 and maybe wait a bit until the price went down because I’m cheap but I think it’s worth the price for the gameplay, graphics, and the online play over Xbox Live. Even non-fans of Naruto should be able to start playing and do well while learning the basic story and characters along the way.

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