Naruto: Uzumaki Chronicles 2 Reviews

The Naruto license does little to compensate for this forgettable brawler's undemanding combat and tedious story.

The Good
It's got ninjas fighting robots.
The Bad
Stiflingly boring cutscenes * Combat is overly easy * Story structure is relentlessly repetitive * Multiple playable characters prove totally unnecessary.

Namco Bandai's unrelenting barrage of Naruto-licensed games continues with Naruto: Uzumaki Chronicles 2. It's been roughly nine months since the original Uzumaki Chronicles hit the US, and though the sequel features a few new bells and whistles, these do little to mitigate the fact that the combat's too simple and too easy to be particularly entertaining.

The threat faced in Uzumaki Chronicles 2 stems from the Shirogane clan, a nearly extinct group of ninjas that specializes in puppet mastery. In an attempt to release their master puppet from an ethereal prison, the remaining clan members have been savaging the countryside with their puppet army while looking for a set of mystical orbs. It's not a bad setup for a brawler like this, given that the puppets are basically robots, and robots are some of the finest cannon fodder you'll find. However, once it's up and running, you'll be constantly tormented with cutscenes of characters standing around and talking, all of which seem to drag on forever. Nothing terribly exciting ever happens during these cutscenes, and even the voice actors sound bored. Fortunately, you can skip these sequences without much consequence. Your mission objectives are always spelled out for you, and they usually just involve beating everyone up anyway.

Uzumaki Chronicles 2 establishes a pattern very early on in the story mode. You start out at your base of operations in the Hidden Leaf Village, where you'll be given a mission objective. Once you leave the village, you'll be shown an overworld map with paths connecting various points of interest. As you travel toward your objective on the map, your journey will be regularly interrupted by surprise attacks from puppets or bandits, and you'll have to beat up everyone before you can continue. Once you've reached your destination, you'll more likely than not have to beat up more puppets and/or bandits. Some light puzzle-solving and platforming are peppered into the missions, but they're either too straightforward or too unclear to add much to the experience. After that, it's yet more random encounters as you head back to the Hidden Leaf Village to take on a new mission and do it all over again. Occasional boss fights mix things up a little, but not much.

The simple, repetitive structure of the story mode wouldn't be so oppressive if the combat itself were more interesting. You can lock on to enemies, perform a few different jump and dash maneuvers, and juggle opponents with combos, but your basic ninjitsu abilities--which include an energized dash attack and the ability to generate a quartet of aggressive if short-lived clones--prove so potent right from the start that most fights don't require your full attention. You can goose your power levels to make the fights even shorter in a few different ways. Enemies drop copious amounts of virtue orbs, which can be used to boost character attributes. They also drop money, which can be used to buy health- and chakra-restoring items, as well as chips that can be placed on the skill plate. Chips can raise attribute levels, imbue you with new abilities, and more. Like the original Uzumaki Chronicles, one of the most engaging aspects of this game is organizing the chips on the skill plate so that you can fit as many on there as possible--and when inventory management is a game's high point, look out.

The game makes a few ineffective gestures to differentiate itself from its predecessor, all of them flawed. In addition to playing as Naruto, there's a rotating cast of other ninjas that you can tag in and play as on the fly, but it's a totally inessential feature, considering that it's rare to find a situation that you can't easily handle with Naruto alone. Pouring all of your virtue orbs and cash into Naruto is simply more effective than spreading it out across multiple ninjas, especially because you don't always have access to the same support characters from mission to mission. There are side missions you can take on for various rewards, but their actual content isn't different enough from what you'll be doing in the main missions, and the rewards are unnecessary. There's two-player co-op support in the story mode, as well as some self-contained, one-on-one brawling, but both are sabotaged by the game's inherently disengaging combat.

If Uzumaki Chronicles 2 offered some flashy visuals, it might've made the low-impact combat more fun to watch. What you get instead are stiff and blocky characters in small, repetitive environments, and an occasionally squirrelly camera. The sound is boilerplate Naruto, with some phoned-in voice acting and background music riddled with Japanese woodwinds.

With less than a year between the release of Naruto: Uzumaki Chronicles 2 and its predecessor, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that the game hasn't changed very radically. At the same time, the proximity of the releases, and the consistently middling level of quality, make this sequel feel that much more superfluous.

Review by Ryan Davis from gamespot.com

The controls, they aren't bad, balanced and playable, if am honest. There are one or two buttons, which I mixed up from time to time, but I guess that was my fault.

The same can't be said about the enemy AI though,
for a slasher / beat em up type of game I expected the opponents to have a bit more oomph, more bite. But in actual fact it seemed boring. But it has to be said I have been against worse AI. A lot worse.

Maybe as boring are the missions, which are repetitive, I know most slashers are repetitive, that even goes for Devil May Cry, but I would so rather play Devil May Cry. I had a lot more fun playing that game. It was just the theatre of it all; Devil May Cry had so much drama and soul. This however just seems dull.

That's not the worst part and certainly not the last of things. Voice acting, for example, irritating to say the least. I would find it less irritating and more relaxing listening to 100 speeches by Mrs. Thatcher, on surround sound.

Then there's' the plot. What in the name of all that's holy were they thinking, its alright up until the point when actors start talking, which is all the time. Thus making what should be good, great maybe, into absolutely diabolical.

I should talk about the graphics at this point. The designers have gone for japanesey style graphics, similar can be found in the Dragon ball Z Budokai games to give it an anime look. Nice idea just it's not done as well as I'd have hoped. Yeah I'm going to use the word dull again.

The worst part is that this game doesn't know what it wants to be.

Missions are slasher/ beat em up/ action adventure sort of things, fine but then the missions are coupled together by waves of RPG elements and annoying ?choose your destination? parts that really interrupt the flow.
And this game is a sequel! I shan't even attempt to ask what the first one was like.


That would have been my verdict if I had ignored the fan base. Naruto does have a fan base, and I suspect that fans will quite like it, because they will find the one thing that I could not. The one thing, which for me lets this game down; its soul.
It's a game's character and charisma that brings me back to a game. Halo2 was a pathetically made game, it wasn't even finished, but it had so much character and charisma, and that's why so many people played it.

The Spiderwick Chronicles is another example. That was made to a budget and in a rush, but it has more character than Naruto.

I struggled to keep playing this game; nothing really interested me about it nor completely won me over. It was either ok, or just diabolical.

But I'm sure fans of Naruto will find it? somehow.
Every time I played this game I kept thinking, ?I could be playing something else?. Every time I went to play it I didn't smile, I didn't look forward to it. Which is a shame. Because I wanted to like it.

this game was a vary interesting game to
play even though i haven't got the last careter yet!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!