Review #195: Naruto Shippuden - Ultimate Ninja Storm Revolution

 Filler done right.

 Another year, another Naruto game... well, technically, this is the second Naruto game I'm tackling in 2015 and the third one I played in less than 364 days time. But I digress, this is, potentially, the last Naruto game on the PS3/X360 generation, and while it is a filler game, it ain't completely terrible.

 There's three main modes: Ninja World Tournament, Ninja Escapades and Free Battle, there's also on-line if you are into that, but I tend to cover mostly offline features, so yeah. Ninja Escapades is made up of three different stories: Akatsuki's Formation, Shisui/Itachi's past and Team Minato interacting with Kushina, all three of them are told via anime cutscenes, they aren't the best animated scenes you'll ever see, but it's original animation and they are more than passable. As for the stories themselves, they are fairly bland and unconvincing, however, I kinda liked the Team Minato/Kushina one, and it was the only one that didn't have a single battle peppered through its duration. Free Battle on the other hand houses: Vs, Survival, Tournament, League and Practice, pretty much the same mainstays from the other games in the series.

  Ninja World Tournament actually is two modes in one, the aforementioned World Tournament and a separate Storyline involving this new character, Mecha Naruto. It lasts about 2 hours, and it's terrible, I found myself laughing at some of the most dramatic scenes, since they were so poorly written. Ninja World Tournament takes place in 'Festival Island', and they made some tweaks to the overworld exploration. For instance, Festival Island is now made up of four big areas, and the character you choose now runs much faster than Naruto did in Ninja Storm 3. It makes finding Missions much, much easier, and exploring the Island is much more fun since it's faster and it has more variety in its geometry, plus, there's 'Mission Stores' in order to find even more side missions. Speaking of stores, sure was annoying when you had to buy stuff one by one... now you can buy it in bulks! And I haven't even mentioned the main event, the Ninja World Tournament. It's divided in 6 classes D, C, B, A, S and S+, naturally, you need to begin from Rank D and clear them from the bottom up.

 The fights in the World Tournament are unlike anything else you've seen in the Storm series, these are 4-man battles, in which dealing damage translates to making orbs fall from the enemy. At the start of each battle, each character has 1000 orbs, and if you drop to 0, you lose. These battles usually are fought in group, and after a battle is done, the next character in your team has to fight another three enemies, while the orbs you got in the last round carry over to this one. At the end, the fighter with the most orbs wins. As you go up in ranks you'll also have to deal with 'obstacles' in the form of NPCs and orbs that allow you to use Ultimate Jutsus or Awakenings. It's definitely different, and this mode has proven to be pretty hit or miss but I liked it... mostly. Y'see, you can't play this mode with other players, nor can it be found under 'Free Battle', plus, at latter levels, the CPUs just gang up on you, it can get quite annoying, which is why characters like Kimimaro, who cover wide areas with their attacks, become very strong. Another issue I had was with the targeting, you can lock on by pressing on the right analog stick, and then switch targets by moving the analog stick around, but switching targets was pretty sloppy, and kinda cumbersome in the heat of battle when you have three guys aiming at you, two of them being outside your vision area!

 There's been a lot of changes, so I'll start with the smaller ones first. Now you can customize your character, which sounds awesome, but it sucks. Customizing means equipping up to three items on your character, most items being Anbu masks. Ever wanted to have Naruto wearing a mask, with two other masks on his shoulders? Now you can. It's really lame. Most accessories aren't even cool. Know what would've helped? Allowing you to change the colors of the characters, say, giving the Raikage Gaara's colors, or maybe even a Black Bijuu Naruto, that would've been awesome and would've made up for the very limited amount of items. For some reason, costumes were removed from Ninja Storm 3, to be honest, most costumes sucked, Napoleon Sasuke? Cowboy Naruto? But why would you remove stuff? Probably so that they could justify selling the swimsuits again, yes, they sunk that low. Speaking of DLC, why would they charge for the Pre-reanimation/Reanimated costumes? The only characters that had any noticeable change, besides their eyes, where the Tsuchikage and the Raikage, these costumes should've been on the game from the get-go. At least the Jinchuriki robes are pretty cool, those are good DLC... except that you need to update the game to use them, so you better not uninstall the game unless you want to download the patches again in order to use the DLC that you bought! Awesome.

 As for positive changes, there's a new 'Counterattack' mechanic which is pretty neat, and if you manage to predict an attack and counter it, you will leave them open for attack... and they can't substitute out of it. Some special team combinations(Like Gaara/Tenmari/Kankuro or Hashirama/Madara) now produce some very epic team ultimate jutsus, even if it's just for eye candy, it's gorgeous eye candy. But the biggest change of them all.... They divided features. Ultimate Jutsu, Support Drive and Awakening, you can only pick ONE of them to take into battle. Each style has its own nuances, Ultimate Jutsu types can cancel out of their attacks to use a Jutsu, Awakening types can Instant Awakening(Now everyone has a generic Awakening, and some characters that used to have special Instant Awakenings(Nine Tails Chakra Mode) are now reduced to a generic IA) and the Support Types can change between offensive and defensive at will. I am most definitely not a fan of this change, I hate how some characters that had unique IAs before now have generic Awakening, and I dislike having to sacrifice a feature in order to use another. Oh, and the dumb ring-outs and anime stills when offing an enemy with an Ultimate Jutsu are back, sadly.

 I can't say that this is the best Ultimate Ninja Storm game, but it is the one with the most characters available to date, which is a huge selling factor to most fans. It's most probably the last Naruto game on last gen consoles, so if you like Naruto and aren't planning to upgrade any time soon, it might be worth it. While I don't like some of the new tweaks, most were pretty damn good, and while it is another filler game, it has much more content than Generations.
 7.0 out of 10