Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm Review (Majinken)
I will start with the positives: The visuals are great, the combat is fun despite being extremely simple and the roster is very good for a first entry. Now with the bad.
The game has two modes (Three if you count the options menu as a mode, I don't), Story and CPU battle. CPU battle is the usual, nothing to mention about that aside from the lack of online. But the story mode, oh boy. You get to "explore" a 3D Konoha and while that's cool for five minutes, there's nothing substancial or fun (more on that later) to do on it.
You progress by selection missions from a menu, which doesn't sound too bad until you realize you need mission XP to keep playing. How do you get mission XP you ask? By doing chores. Developers need to understand already that if you force the player to do a sidequest, then it's not a sidequest, it's padding.
Every three or five missions the game expects you to go do the most boring sidequest in existence, like playing a set number of hours (Just let the game on and go do something else), walk a certain number of steps, break a certain number of objects, grab every collectible (With the majority of them being bought on the store, so grind for money VS the CPU for hours just to enjoy the story) or playing the same minigames over and over. There are some missions centered around combat challenges, but there are few and far between. It also highlights another issue, which is that the game doesn't bother explaining you anything. Yes, it does tell you what button you press to punch and which one makes you jump, you know, basic stuff. But anything beyond that is up to you, you're on your own. The few combat missions there are will require you to end the match in a certain way, but the game hasn't bothered to tech you how to do it, let alone let you practice it. There's also a couple fights against giant enemies and it was hilarious to see a sidequest spoil a boss I hadn't fought yet in the story, the cherry on top.
It's not even a good story mode, since it lacks any sort of cinematic, being just a sequence of fights with the ocassional boss or minigame (the same minigames and bosses you fight in the sidequests mind you) thrown in there. Not to mention it skips over the Zabuza arc entirely.
This is the kind of game you only play when your friends come over.