You name it and Dream Factory will get a random dungeon generator in it.
For the longest time I thought that
Naruto Shippuden: Ninja Destiny 2 was nothing more than a stripped down port of Clash of Ninja, I even looked at videos and it looked really similar. But I was
wrong, a Sober Dwarf video taught me that the Ninja Destiny sub-series of games were developed by DreamFactory, the guys that made Tobal and Ergheiz! And while this is a one-on-one 3-D fighting game that
looks a lot like Clash of Ninja, it's a very different game!
The game has a small but
acceptable number of modes: Story Mode, Single Player(VS CPU, Survival, Quest Mode) and Wireless VS. The story mode goes from the Rescue Gaara arc up to the first time Naruto and Sasuke meet. It's very
abridged and very boring. It has a
very small top-down Konoha town you can run through in a few chapters of the Story, completely unnecessary but totally
amusing, as well as a few segments that, while still played on a top-down view, are made up of randomly generated areas, with random encounters that trigger one-on-one fights against
generic ninja. Survival and VS CPU are pretty much self explanatory, but then we've got Quest Mode which is a mode made up of 30 randomly generated floors, in which you can level up your character and collect
helpful items you can use mid-fight. It's also very,
very boring.
The basic roster is made up 22 characters, which as you can easily figure out, are
not enough to cover the basics. Oh, and three of those are Naruto and his Kyuubi forms. We're missing characters such as Hinata, Kiba, Shino, Ino and Choji, although in the game's defense, they hadn't had any fights during this time in the manga, so they would've had to
make up techniques for their now grown-up selves.
If you are good enough, or learn how to exploit the CPU, you can unlock the 12 original, pre-timeskip characters from the original game. Oh, yeah, unlocking characters can be a bit of a pain. One-tailed Naruto needs you to beat the story in the 'Difficult' setting, which is incredibly unfair since some fights in that mode have you dealing
scratch damage to the bosses. Unlocking the pre-timeskip characters requires beating 15 enemies in said difficulty setting on the Survival mode. Honestly, I just mashed Y with basic Naruto and pressed L when necessary, and,
somehow, I unlocked everyone. Well, mostly, y'see, Four-tailed Naruto requires beating the 30-floor dungeon with all 10 available charaters. I finished it with Sasuke and it was
SO DAMN BORING that I don't even care about four tailed Naruto anymore.
Thankfully, in the fighting the game really
shines. You have a weak and a strong attack that can be comboed together, each character has different combo strings, and you also have different attacks
depending on which direction you press alongside either button. Y is used to jump, because up and down on the d-pad are
side-steps, and A can be used to pull off your super move when your chakra gauge is full... or you can use 50% of your chakra to teleport behind an enemy, it can be used defensively, to avoid damage or to avoid a combo, or offensively, to extend some combos or just to exploit an opening, which adds a lot of
freedom into how you tackle a fight. The lower screen can be touched to use support items, each character gets six different items before a battle.
While Naruto Shippuden: Ninja Destiny 2 has
mediocre content, the actual fighting is actually pretty good. The L-teleport mechanic lends itself to some very fun and
exciting fights, and the game looks quite good
considering it's a 3-D DS game, with fine animations to boot. It's not the most competitive of anime fighters, even a cursory glance reveals that some characters(Sasuke... just like in Clash of the Ninja Revolution for Wii!) are
undeniably better than others, with better combo potential and tools, but for a handheld game it's tolerable. Still, while I'm willing to be forgiving on fighting games that have great gameplay but poor single player modes, that just won't fly with a handheld game, which lives and dies on said content,
6.5 out of 10
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