Review #167: Naruto Shippuden Ultimate Ninja Storm Generations

 They even made videogame-filler, hot damn!

 Ah! I remember Ninja Storm 2, it was an... interesting game. I'm still more fond of the Clash of the Ninja series, but that's as far as gameplay goes, for Fan service, I'd go straight to Ultimate Ninja Storm. It'd seem Namco-Bandai found their cash cow. But y'know what, I'm OK with the milking as long as the quality doesn't drop. This time around, they brought back the Pre-Timeskip characters from UNS 1 and added a few new ones, made a gameplay tweak and called it a day. Really!

 Remember Ninja Storm's 2 fantastic story mode? How you could go through Konoha and Suna? Those awesome boss battles(And I'm no fan of QTEs!)? Yeah... all of that is gone. The Story Mode is now made up of various individual stories, Each one is prefaced and concluded by a short anime movie, as far as I noticed, all the footage is brand new, and the quality varies between clips. The rest of the stories are told by anime stills and voice-overs. This is... a mess, if you are not familiar with the series, you probably won't make sense of it, it mentions names and plot devices every now and then, assuming you are familiar with them. Worst of all, each story is focused on different characters, which makes it very disjointed, not to mention how the game barely covers any new ground after Ultimate Ninja Storm 2. You'll also get to fight some fights from both fighters point of views, but you can't change the outcome, so it feels like padding. Speaking of padding, why do Zabuza and Haku get a Story Mode? No, really, they get a complete story mode just to cover their short fight, which you already read about in Naruto's story mode. And Killer's B story is also just filler, but at least it's hilarious.

 The gameplay is basically the same as previous games, one button performs attacks, which you can slightly change the "ender" by holding(or not) a direction on the analog stick, another button performs jumps(for movements on any direction), a button for shuriken and another one to use chakra-related moves. There's been one change, which I'm still not totally sold on, to how evading works. Previously, you'd have to tap Block just before getting hit, and you could do it indefinitely, which certainly became tedious, particularly since you could just mash block and hope for the best. This time around, dodging is tied to a new 5-gauge meter, which refills itself after a little while, and you no longer need to time it. Frankly, I'm not sure how much I like the fact that you have to wait for it to fill, or the fact that you no longer need to time it. What the new system means is that whoever uses the Substitution jutsu first, is the one who is gonna lose the trade and take damage.

 There's not a whole lot to do, Story Mode, Free Battle and Online Battles. I talked about the Story mode previously, but it's worth mentioning that it can get really hard. You are to fight beefed up opponents(Eventually they'll be able to easily take more than a fourth of you health bar with just one combo) and it seems that their Substitution gauge refills rather fast. These fights are much harder than any other CPU in other modes. Free Battle allows you to do simple VS matches, Survival, Tournament and Training, all of these can be played in Single or Teams. Most of the non-character collectibles are unlockable through playing the various Survival courses, and there's a lot of them, so at least it's a little extra to keep you busy.

 There's no denying it, the game looks beautiful, and the animations are oh so smooth. However, it's not as impressive looking as Ninja Storm or Ninja Storm 2 for the simple fact that the incredible boss fights are gone. Most returning characters saw little to no changes, which means that the animations are the same, these is only an issue for a few of them, like Jiraiya, that as good as the animations are... the attacks "look" very slow and lack any punch(He doesn't punch either!). Voice Acting is done by series regulars(Both Dub and Japanese), and as for the music.... it's eh. I've never been a fan of the UNS soundtrack, and this game is no exception.

 This game is filler, plain and simple. Namco wanted money but couldn't wait another whole year for Naruto's storyline to develop, so they just produced this game to earn some money in the mean time. It's hard to even recommend to Naruto fans, since the story mode covers so little new ground. The new characters are nice 'n all, but the next game kept them, added even more and has a proper story line, so there's no point to this game. At least the basic gameplay is fun.
 6.0 out of 10