Unless you're a fan of the show, within the first five minutes of beginning the main game you'll be alienated. It opens with a dialogue box basically saying Uzumaki Naruto is a ninja in training. That's it. There's no background as to his origins, or who the multitude of other characters that pop up throughout the game are; just "you're a ninja, so go beat up thugs". There's a brief tutorial teaching you the basics of combat, which is pretty decent, and then you're whisked away to a menu screen where the stringy, gristle-filled, meat-flavoured supplement of the main game begins.
Much like the show, Naruto: Uzumaki Chronicles is basically a series of missions which ultimately involve some combat. Unlike the show, there's no storyline for a very long time and the combat isn't actually any fun. Mission one has you delivering a cart of goods to a neighbouring village. This consists of moving your cursor over a red dot on the map and watching Naruto slowly wander over. Within a few steps you have your first encounter with one of many very, very frustrating load times. See that spinning leaf in the corner? Get used to it; you'll be seeing that thing a lot. About seven seconds later you'll hear some lousy dialogue with fairly decent voice acting, and combat begins.
Fighting in this game consists of two basic punching combos with a third way to 'mix' the two. You also have three special abilities (or jutsu's): Power strike - which makes you glow blue and pushes you forward for moderate damage; Shadow Clone - in which two (and later, up to four) clones of your character appear and help beat up your foe, and Sexy Jutsu - wherein Naruto turns momentarily into a busty bikini-clad babe and causes a knock-back and stun effect to surrounding enemies. Yeah, that's right.
You start with all three of these, and you gain only minor (and optional) upgrades to these as the game progresses, with the exception of the Shadow Clone, which becomes completely overpowered.
The game's AI is lacklustre at best. Enemies use the same moves over and over again, and occasionally just stand there for upwards of twenty seconds without doing a thing. You can lock-on with the L1 button, but you can't easily determine who you want to lock onto with any accuracy; though, even if you could, it wouldn't matter because the majority of the time Naruto completely ignores his locked-on target in favour of someone to the left of the screen.
Upon defeating a foe, you will see yellow and blue orbs, and occasionally an item bag, spring forth from the body. These are Virtue and Chakra orbs. Chakra is your basic stamina gauge, allowing you to use your special abilities, while Virtue is akin to experience points. By collecting these you can improve your health and stamina, and buy new "skill chips".
Skill chips go in a chip plate, which is basically a grid of triangles shaped vaguely like a leaf or frog, and these alter your basic stats. The number and type of chips you insert into the grid affects your strength and defence by a numerical value and, if you fill up the entire plate, by a percentage as well. While this initially seems intriguing, it falls flat when you realise that each plate does the exact same thing, just with a different number of slots. It's a missed opportunity, because having specific adjacent chips add to each other, or specific chip combinations alter each other would have added some much needed depth and customisability to what is ultimately a simple stat bar.
Completing a mission nets you a bulk virtue bonus as well as items to use in battle, or more skill chips. Every time you complete a mission successfully, you have to return to the village to pick up a new one - this is where the game falls flatter than an eight-month old-glass of Coke. Almost all the missions follow the exact same formula. You leave the village, travel somewhere, and on the way you have random, inescapable, and frustratingly frequent battles, all peppered by that tedious load screen. It is literally only after getting past the half-way point that an actual plot line develops, and even then, it's stretched so thin that it's almost non-existent anyway.
When we say 'plot line', what we mean is text at the end of a mission which tells you "IT TURNS OUT THEY WERE ZOMBIES" or "SASUKE HAS DISAPPEARED BUT DON'T WORRY, HE'S JUST TRAINING ELSEWHERE" and later "THESE ZOMBIES WERE THE SAME AS THE OTHER ZOMBIES; ERGO OROCHIMARU IS BEHIND IT ALL!" You can always tell when a mission you're on is part of the actual 'plot', because there's an element of free-roaming to it. These missions, unlike 99 per cent of the others, are borderline fun for the simple reason that you can run past your foes into the next area and do some basic exploration.
What makes them borderline are the platforming elements involved. Naruto jumps like a marionette being dragged by its strings. There are parts (especially later on, in the cave with the underground lake) where you will jump, have Naruto land on the edge, and watch him vibrate as he decides whether or not you've landed on the platform. Usually he decides you haven't and you'll have to run all the way back to try again. Eighty six times.
There are a few mini-games thrown into the mix where you can earn secret skill chips - in particular, there's gambling with dice (great for the kids!) and a Simon-Says button matching "ninjutsu hand sign" game. The button matching game is disproportionately difficult for the prizes you get, while the dice game virtually gives you the best items for free. When you have to get the highest roll with three dice, our opponent rolled triple ones literally eight times in a row, before rolling double ones and a six. We never lost a single roll. Ever. And we tried to.
Graphically, the game looks okay, although all of the characters are a little glass-eyed. Fans of the show will be pleased with the generous servings of Neji, Gaara and Sasuke, but disappointed by the lack of Rock Lee (two lines of dialogue in the entire game, one of which is "Don't call me bushy-brow." Hmmm.) The traditional Japanese and rock fusion background familiar in the show has been replaced by much more generic, and much more infuriating, sounds, especially the village music.