Nine Tailed Fox? Really Scary! What's Next? A Nine Tailed Hamster!?

I am a man of constant sorrow
I've seen trouble all my day.
I bid farewell to old Kentucky
The place where I was born and raised.
(The place where he was born and raised.)

So there I was, the innocent Naruto fan, searching stores to find this game. I looked around for a long time and then one day, at Electronic’s Boutique, I found it. I wept for joy. When putting this in my Gamecube and playing it, I wept for different reasons. Oh my brothers, this game has done a number on me. At this moment, I am a poor, sad, and melancholy soul. So do not disturbeth me my brothers and sisters, I am in a state of extreme confusion right now. Confusion about what you ask? Confusion because I love the game’s fighting, but I hate the game’s story mode. I love the game and hate it! I cannot figure out why they made the story mode to this game the way it is, but I shall get to that later. Oh, help me with my dilemma, oh my brothers and sisters. Right now I am so depressed about this game that I am this close to going emo (I am spreading my index finger and thumb apart so that they are about an inch away from each other). Why do the video game companies have to do this to me? I mean I’ve had enough suffering in my life as it is. For example, ummm, I had asthma as a boy. The state of utter confusion this game has left me with I cannot even begin to explain. Yesterday, at the Chinese restaurant I ate my soup with my fork and I used a spoon for my Chow Mein noodles. Life is hard right now, but what is life other than that cheesy late 90’s boy band LFO (replacing the O with an E and adding an I after L and then lowercasing it).

Naruto’s a dude who has a giant mythical creature called the nine tailed fox trapped in his body. He does various missions trying to up his rank and eventually be Hokage, the highest rank. The story of the game is what has been bothering me about the game. The story mode is the main mode that you are going to play. This is where you unlock everything. There is an arcade mode and survival mode, and while those modes are fun, the game did definitely need something extra that was more rewarding because there is so little content in those modes. That’s where they were going with the story mode. The story mode is why I bought the game. I wanted to relive the Naruto series, or at least part of it. The guy at the game store told me that it focused on the bridge builder escort mission and the Chunin exams. That covers about the first sixty or so episodes of the Naruto series. I was psyched. What the guy at the store failed to mention was that the story was completely off in every possible way. If the only people that are going to be buying this are Naruto fans, why wouldn’t they make the story as accurate as possible to make the fans feel as if they are playing the shows? This is Naruto people! Not freakin War and freakin Peace. The story mode doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of what the anime was like. The story starts off introducing Naruto very briefly and then has him fight Iruka Sensei in a competition to get ramen noodles. Uhhh, this never happened. Then they skip a ton of scenes from the show and have him fight Sasuke for no reason (that didn’t happen either). Then he fights Sakura. Yeah that never happened. Okay so maybe, just maybe, they could’ve added maybe a fight or two just to make it so there are more battles so that the story mode wasn’t too short it would be okay. However, in this game rarely is there a fight that actually occurred in the anime! They go to the same places as in the anime but fight different battles. They give you extremely brief reasons on why they are at the places they are in the first place and the funny thing is, they don’t even tell you the truth sometimes on why they are fighting those battles. This is a rare occasion… the game is lies to you. The characters don’t act the same; Naruto is can beat Rock Lee, Sasuke and even his teacher. He is amazing from the beginning! Sasuke is extremely arrogant and brags about how good he is all the time. In the story mode you get to play as many of the twenty characters that you can play as in the single and multiplayer modes which definitely gets you used to playing the game. However, when I could be in the Guiness Book of World Records for world’s longest cringe, being able to play as the main characters doesn’t really make it a whole lot better.

The fighting in the game is just awesome. It captures everything that you know and love from the show. Every character has his or her own style that mirrors what theirs is on the show. Pretty much every move that every character does is a move that they’ve done on the show. Each character has several signature moves such as Naruto’s “Uzumaki Barrage,” Kakashi Sensei’s “Thousand Years of Death,” and Gaara’s “Sand Burial.” All of these attacks have the same things in common: they make you feel exactly like you are playing as the characters in the show and they all look REALLY cool. This is where the Dragon Ball Z: Budokai games went wrong. They would give you so many characters that they didn’t zoom in on each character making them different and incorporating attacks from the show; every character seemed like the same guy.

The fighting is actually pretty interesting. Every character has about thirty or so attacks, twenty of those being combos. Now don’t exit the page just yet, die hard fighting fans. While maybe it doesn’t have the combo complexity of Tekken, the game is definitely tactical. Each move has a right place and a right time to use it. There are times when you know you’re going to get wailed upon so you have to act quick and do a Substitution Jutsu, making your body appear behind the character after he attacks your fake body. At a mid-range distance and don’t know what to do? Well you may want to burrow underground and jump under the enemy, providing your guy knows how to do that. At the same time you have to try to not get your back to the enemy and try to get your enemy’s back to you. Suppose you jump over an enemy and your back is faced to him; you need to spin around and attack him but it takes about a second to do this so you’re enemy can really throw any of his tricks at you, and he’s probably going to use his power attack. As you fight, you gain chakra to unleash different attacks. When your chakra meter is full you can unleash your crazy power attack. So there may not be any huge strings of combos in the game, but this ain’t no kiddy game bro. Sure, kids will enjoy it, because it’s not a very hard game to learn how to play, but fighting fans can even enjoy it because there is definitely skill in the fighting. It doesn’t take long to learn every combo for a character, but you’ll have to spend your sweet time practicing with them to know when to use the attacks.

You’re mostly going to be playing multiplayer in Clash of Ninja 2, because like I have said before, the story mode just absolutely sucks. For multiplayer you have your basic one-on-one and a four-way fighting mode. The four-way fighting mode is just a mess and you’re not going to want to even try it. It’s not tag team; there are literally four people on the court battling it out and it’s very hard to tell what the heck is going on. The game is fun, but those who watch Naruto are going to be much more into the game than those who aren’t. There are much better fighters out there, why should they play this one? If you can find another friend who likes Naruto (good luck with that) it will be a blast.

One thing that I noticed was that the characters are definitely unevenly matched. Gaara pretty much beats everyone and Sakura can’t even really put a scratch on anyone. When playing with my friend, there was a growing trend to which characters we picked. We constantly had that race to Gaara.

So what does this one improve on over the first Clash of Ninja? Well… the odd thing is that this isn’t even a true sequel. If you have the original, there is really no reason to buy this. The major additions is the four-way fighting mode (yuck), a longer story mode (yuck), and a training mode (there isn’t really any reason to play this). It’s almost as if the developers lost some of the game’s files and then after they released the game Bob on the developing crew said, “Oops guys! I put the files on this folder on my desktop.” “Schucks Bob!” his coworkers said as they give him a thumbs down, “You are a stinky face but you’re still a swell pal to all of us!” At the time, if I were to have had the original and then bought this new I would have felt cheated, but now the games have the same retail price and you get some extra features with this version.

The graphics in the game are actually very good. The game is cell shaded and has that similar cartoony look to games such as Killer 7 and XIII. The levels are dark and spooky or light and vibrant depending on where you are and definitely capture the look of the show. The character models are very well done and are perfect depictions of the 2D characters in 3D. When the attacks looked absolutely awesome in the cartoon, you know that when they switch them over to full 3D they’re going to look sweet. All in all, this game looks great. The frame rate is extremely smooth and never suffers from slowdown. The game has a better frame-rate than the show itself, which isn’t saying much considering that the show runs at about a half a frame a second.

The sound in the game is very well done… kinda. This is a rare occasion in video games. Literally EVERY cast member from the show made an appearance to do voice work in the game. Now that sounds nice right? Well, the voice acting is just hideous in the show, so that means that the voice acting is going to be hideous in this. Also, listening to the characters acting out the story mode is just painful to listen to. The voice actors had to feel like fools acting out these scenes that never happened in the anime. The music is pretty generic, and consists of just fast paced music that sounds suitable for an anime. Some of the guitar riffs are actually decent. You really can’t hear the music all that well because of all the characters screaming their battle cries constantly; the volume of the battle cries are about 3 times louder than the music so if for some reason you really want to hear the music, you’re going to have to endure the characters screaming extremely loud and repetitive lines.

The game is rated T for teen for cartoon violence. The violence is pretty minimal and is pretty close to being on the same level as the tv show. There is no blood and gore, just guys beating the crap out of each other in a cartoon like manner.

So should you buy this game? Well I’m going to put this in four categories of people:

You love Naruto and what to play this game with your friends that love Naruto and don’t care about the horrible story:
By all means, buy this!

You love Naruto and want to play the story mode:
If you love Naruto, you should check the game out, but I wouldn’t buy it. The story mode is horrible, but you’ll probably have fun playing as the different characters from the show in the single and multiplayer modes.

You don’t love Naruto and you want a good fighting game:
The game is decent, but there are much better fighters out there (yes even on the Gamecube).

You don’t love Naruto and you don’t want a good fighting game:
Uhh, yeah, don’t get this one.


Visuals – 8 The game has a great cartoony look to it!
Audio – 7: A full cast of voice-overs and average sounding music.
Story – 1.5 The story mode is just hideous in every way imaginable.
Fun – 5.5 The game will be a lot of fun for Naruto fans, but the game itself will feel pretty average for non-Naruto fans.
Value – 3.5 The story mode is both short and horrible. Other than the story mode there isn’t much content to be found here.

Overall: 5.0 Here’s the thing. I’ve played this game for a long time. The extreme hatred for the story mode and the love of the combat has equaled my feelings out. Honestly, I don’t have really any strong feelings about this game. It’s fun… but at the same time it isn’t.