Naruto: Clash of Ninja Review

This is about as forgettably medicore games as forgettably mediocre can get. Not sure if I can outright call this game bad since well, I didn't pay a dime for it and I just emulated it, I also got to the end and rolled credits.

The fighting, I guess is functional, you got your usual combo attacks with B and A buttons and you can press Y to do a scripted overly telegraphed special move, x is for throwing and press L and R to move around the plane since many fighting games of this time were like this. Time it well and you do a substituion and teleport from beind kind of like in some of the Dragon Ball Z Budokai games. None of this is outright bad and is just functional enough to be a bare minimum fighter.

The real flaw of the game is how you can beat the story mode in less than 30 minutes and it's some of the most forgettable less than 30 minutes of gameplay that I have a hard time even recalling. I never judge games based on how "memorable" they are since I think it's a flawed way to judge them but this game does nothing remarkable outside of the visuals which is pretty faithful to the source material. Speaking of the source material, the story goes up to the Land of the Waves arc and if you are familar with the series at all, that already sounds like you can't make much of a game campaign around. They could've added "filler" in it to pad out the length much like the Naruto anime itself does but apart of me does respect the devs for their honesty and just have it end super quickly. It's still by no means a faithful adaptation of the Land of the Waves arc since in the story mode you primarily play as Naruto and there are fights that never happen in the anime like Naruto getting into a fist fight with Iruka and Sakura, Naruto actually defeating Zabuza in one on one combat or my personal favorite(if you beat the game without losing once) get into a fight with Rock Lee to show off how cool Naruto is.

Overall, I played this game at all because I was looking for something short and I just wanted to experience the short length of the campaign in order to no pun intended, "believe it". It's easy to see this game was even made at all because the Naruto anime was a hot property at the time, it's strange how this and the DBZ fighting games were some of the casual fighters that kept the genre going the early to late 00s but I'd even say the original DBZ Budokai has more worthwhile content and just holds up better than this does despite that game also being a medicore fighter. Still, if you have an interest in short games and are looking for a game to be just functional enough and nothing terrible, this isn't the worst time but if you have a hard time recalling the game after you beat it like I do, then I understand.