If you haven’t heard of Naruto, here is some background information. It was first released as a manga series in the weekly Japanese Shonen Jump magazine. It’s becoming more popular outside of Japan, just like Dragonball Z & Yu-Gi-Oh! Naruto has had over 300 chapters of manga, and over 175 episodes of anime have been aired on Japanese TV. Not to mention over a dozen video games that have been released in Japan .
This Naruto: Ninja Council game for the GBA takes place in the “Village Hidden in the Leaves”. You are there for a Survival Challenge, and it’s just training. The main character is the young hyperactive ninja in training called Naruto Uzumaki. The other playable character is the low level ninja Sasuke Uchiha. The third non-playable character in the group is a female ninja student named Sakura Haruno. Using a special ability called Genjutsu, she hides throughout the levels waiting to give you more health. She is still in training, and that could explain why she wasn’t very hard to find. Finally, the high level ninja Kakashi Hatake is there to help you throughout the challenge.
As a fan of 2D side scrollers from the SNES era, I was looking forward to this game. It started out great, but after only a couple hours the gameplay became repetitive. There wasn’t enough variety. You start out with the same 3 special moves as you end with. The special moves give the game some graphical style, and if they could have added a bunch more, it would have kept the game more exciting. My favorite special move was the “Naruto Uzumaki Barrage”. It deals out a multiple hit combo, and also helps you learn how to pronounce “Naruto Uzumaki”, as he yells out the name of the barrage. Be careful! Even though missing the special move is hard to do, you get the always funny “fart” if you do.
Along with the special moves, you get ninja tools and other ninjutsu skills. Your first ninja tool is shuriken (throwing stars), not to be confused with the Street Fighter dragon punch called Shouryuken. You then get two other ninja tools; senbon (bi-directional needles) and Kunai (throwing knifes). Your first few ninjutsu abilities all break through walls, floors and trees. These abilities include earth, wind & fire (not our parent’s favorite band), and let’s not forget lightning. My favorite ninjutsu was wind. It increased your jumping ability, but it was not used very often. The other game controls worth mentioning are the ability to run faster, and run up walls.
The game supports 2 modes, story mode and free mode. Free mode doesn’t do anything special other than allow you to go back and play previous levels. After you’ve cleared the game’s 7 stages, you can go back and play it with the 2nd character. The only change will be the 3 special moves that you have, and the voice clips. I personally liked Naruto better than the more serious Sasuke.
Finally, you can’t have a classic side scroller without collection. In this game, you are out to collect 100 leaf symbols. The first time through, I picked up 80 of them. To get more out of the game, you can spend time finding all the leaves, and clearing the game with both characters to unlock a hidden mode & special powers.
I’ll go back to practicing my nunchucks. I think their legal in my state? “Believe It!”
|
Review Scoring Details for NARUTO: Ninja Council |
Gameplay: 5.5
The controls are responsive, but the fighting doesn’t offer much variety. The levels and overall game are short.
Graphics: 6.1
The graphics during normal game play are nothing special, however the special attacks offer up a nice visual flair.
Sound: 5.2
Considering the anime has some good music, you would think they could have used better music for the game. The fun voice clips keep the score above five.
Difficulty: Medium
You should be able to clear this game in about 5 hours or less, with some heavy use of the "B" button (or the "b" button if you have a GBA Micro).
Concept: 6.4
The underlying game elements could make for a great game. More care needs to be taken to expand on the special moves, ninjutsu abilities, and level design.
Overall: 5.6
This game was fun for a couple hours, lasted only a few, and left me wanting to go back to watching the anime series.
