For those not versed in the lore of Naruto, we'll spare you the complexities - watch the show or play the game and you'll pick up the key points pretty quickly. All you really need to know is that Naruto, the game's central protagonist, is a blonde, spiky-haired ragamuffin with a chip on his shoulder and ambitions about being a totally awesome ninja. Unfortunately, he has repeatedly flunked out of ninja school and everybody hates him, but that doesn't matter because - get this - deep inside of him lies the spirit of the Nine Tailed Fox - a hugely powerful and fearsome beast that makes Naruto a natural at ninja techniques and hand-symbol magic, called jutsu.
Rise of a Ninja chronicles Naruto's journey through all the key episodes of the series, highlighting them in little animated and somewhat roughly compressed cutscenes. The quality was obviously sacrificed to cram more in there, so we'll let it slide. The game starts off slowly, introducing you to the mechanics at a very gradual pace. If you're one of those gamers that hates tutorial sections of games, the first hour or so will drive you nuts. The pacing is definitely off here - you essentially get to choose from a bunch of fetch-quests that ask you to skittle around the gorgeously rendered town seeking out coins for village storeowners who apparently can't afford even the most basic supplies. Cry us a river!
Still, the introduction serves to familiarise you with the city, which is pretty amazing. In a lot of ways, Naruto: Rise of a Ninja reminds us a little bit of Assassin's Creed - another Ubisoft Montreal production. The scale of Naruto's small stature compared with the sprawling township of Konoha set at the base of the carved mountainside is impressive. Naruto himself has very basic free-running abilities - he'll automatically jump small obstacles in his path, cling to edges of rooftops or any useable surface and eventually, when you unlock the double-jump ability, you can effectively dash across rooftops and through the city like every ninja worth his red bean buns should.
This brings us nicely to the driving gameplay feature of the game - the fighting. This is a game based on a show about ninjas after all, so how does it play? The short answer is, very, very well. The longer answer: if you took the speed of a game like Tekken and simplified the combat controls back to two buttons, gave it a strong magical element in line with Dragon Ball: Z and stuck the characters in a circular combat area, that's the flavour of Naruto: Rise of a Ninja.
Attacks are grouped into three categories - punching, kicking and jutsu. The first two are combo-based, using different combinations of the X, Y and A (jump) buttons to string together attacks. Blocking with B opens your opponent up to attack, while well-timed blocks actually reorient you to behind your enemy, allowing for unhindered access to their kidneys. So far, this side of combat is quite by-the-books, but when you introduce scrolls to modify aspects of your strength and damage, and start using your throwing knives to interrupt or parry attacks, the underlying balance behind the combat becomes clear. Even more than that though, using tactics to time your jutsu attack is critical.
Jutsu magic is controlled with the thumbsticks. By holding down the left trigger, you can bring up an in-game window that allows for jutsu movement input. There are several key jutsu to master, and you start accruing them from near the start of the game. They all have upgradeable levels of effectiveness, too, adding another layer of depth. By correctly moving the sticks in the required directions and letting go of the trigger at the right time, the jutsu attacks can be very effective. They do use up your chakra bar even if you fail to correctly summon it, though - this is a little unfair, but it really forces you to make sure you have the time in battle to activate it.
If you do get pummelled into submission and repeatedly have to retry the battles, you can refresh what is called a 'memoclip' - basically an extra life. You collect memoclips through completing various key missions or encounters, and if you get knocked out along the way, you can activate it and mash A repeatedly to regain your health and chakra. It's a good system that is thoughtfully geared towards more casual players that doesn't detract from the more hardcore fighting mechanics in the game.
It's impossible to talk about this game without making at least some mention of the graphics. For fans of the series, there are fewer cheaper thrills than wandering around key locations like The Forest of Death or in and around the streets of the city, marvelling at how much effort has gone into nailing the look of the game. Characters are superbly reproduced in cell-shaded 3D, with a lot of care going into ensuring the facial animations and quirky visual humour of the show didn't get lost in the process. In fact, there are instances when the show really begins to demonstrate the limitations of 2D when a 3D version of the sequence pops up on the screen. The Sexy Jutsu's effect on susceptible characters is a classic, leaving them a demented, wriggling and twitching mess - straight out of the show.
In fact, one of the biggest things Naruto: Rise of a Ninja has going for it is its accessibility and genuinely entertaining humour. The decision to carry on through all 80 episodes and provide cutscenes along the way means that non-fans get almost as much out of the game as the Naruto-devout. The script is pretty clever, supported by the English-only voice acting, which is pretty acceptible. Of course, we would love to see a Japanese-dub option (like Eternal Sonata, also on Xbox 360), but if you can take the English dub on the show, then you won't mind this one bit. [Update: Ubisoft announced overnight that a Japanese dub option will be made available on Xbox Live! Score!]
The game only really starts to show its less pleasant colours when it steers away from its fighting and exploration strengths in favour of linear and routinely silly platforming sections. Because the jump mechanic has a slight hang-time in the air, judging your jump distance can be a pain. Also, spike walls, jutting columns of razors and swinging obstacles are so 1994.
The game also seems to retread a bit of ground for the first half of the adventure too - Ubisoft made the decision to steer you through the story and the game by blocking off paths with landslides and random inconveniences that pop up and then disappear after you're done in the area without explanation. At a very basic level, we kind of wish that a little more time had been spent on the finer details too - getting rid of the repeating character models for enemies, or randomising their clothing or faces. It's not game-destroying, but you will notice it and it might bug you.
There's more than enough depth to the adventure though - as much as the show deals with, anyway. There are subquests, delivery missions, scrolls and weapons to collect and upgrade, secrets and unlockables, plus a fully-fledged arcade-style fighting mode with multiplayer and full online support. The music, lifted mostly from the show, is bouncy faux-rock that we found ourselves bopping along to, while quickly looking around to see if anyone was watching. They weren't.