They are not exact clones of each other, with some variation on their moves, they just represent another stage of their character, mostly on the great ninja war, as almost everyone have some sort of "transformation".

For me, i´ve bought every title in the series and now i´m kinda fed up, i think they should just wait until the anime is finished and release the "Ultimate" version, instead of a yearly update on the roster, is not so far from reaching the ending, with the manga rapidly aproaching a conclussion.

So 83 individual characters with 161 different versions.

Seriously 7 Sasuke's and only 5 Naruto's and why does Kankuro also get 5! while Kakashi gets 4 and Sakura gets only 3 hell Haku gets 3 versions.

Is there some Kankuro fanbase I never new existed out there?

im waiting for the last one aftrer the manga is done

A RPG in general would work for me. They could do so much more with the moves and animations that way. And they could go deeper into the story. I like the games but I agree they should try something different.

I don´t know, i´ve played other Naruto games in different genres, and they are not that much fun, but i think that with so much more materal they have now, they can come up with something unique. That said, i like the way theese fighting games look and feel, they are very fast paced and very flashy, but the frequent updates with minor upgrades (sometimes downgrading good parts of the games before) are making me feel sick of it, but if dragon ball is any indication, i doubt we will see a "final" game.

I´ll wait for a game that has all characters and all story archs and stick with it, like i did with dragon ball:budokai tenkaichi 3 a few years back, no game after has come close to it (of course, this is my opinion).

Oh I love the fighting in the games and the pace myself. And yeah with the way the Manga is going I would want them to wait as well seeing as there are now even more characters. My thought is make it more of like a game along the lines of teh Tales series. RPG with action elements but still the PRG feel. That would be perfect if done right in my opinion. Because they would not have to change the drawings and animations for real. And they could expand the battle system for like the 3 and 4 man cell teams. If done right I think it would be an amazing exoereince for the fans and for RPG fans in general. 

That is an interesting idea, you could be traveling with a rotating party , learning abillities and team attacks, keeping it fresh all the way without sacrificing the fast paced action. Also a way to customize your party members strategies, like gambits on FF XII, or take full control of them, like in Xenoblade Chronicles, I would love that.

Remember back in the good ol' days when a character and his transformations was just 1 character? Like in Budokai, Goku was Goku, he could transform into Kaioken, Super Saiyan, Ultra Super Saiyan, etc...but on the character list, it was just "Goku". Now in later games, Goku, SS Goku, SS2 Goku, SS3 Goku, etc are all separate characters. And those games have all been considered to be of lower quality (probably has to do with gameplay mechanics moreso than character lists).

And anime based games have been following this model for a while now too. It's really annoying. It'd make the fighting so much better if all the variables of different transformations and techniques could be thrown into a single match, instead of Naruto being limited to Naruto, Sage Naruto being limited to Sage Naruto, etc. If you could go in as Naruto, then switch to Sage Mode or Kurama Cloak Mode, it would add depth to the gameplay. It's dumb that "Sasuke" and "Sharingan Sasuke" are separate characters.

Excuse the spelling in that last reply geez it was bad lol. And yeah that would be perfect if they did it like that. And even gave to opposing sides like one side of the story dealing with Naruto and the other side dealing with the path Sauske was taking. But alas I doubt they will ever do it.....never hurts to dream though.

I can agree with you on that, but i think they do it because not every character have any sort of transformation and they want to keep the game a little balanced. They could change their movesets and keep the damage balanced, but it seems a little unfair to those characters that stay the same throughout the whole battle.

But i totally agree, the game feels a lot more "true" to the series it is based on with the characters transforming mid battle.