To Naruto Fans

[binary solo]

My 11-year old and 13-year old sons play it and really like it. They are both really into the whole Naruto thing (books, TV show).

My impressions of having occasionally watched them play it:

Graphics look good (as good as the animated TV series, so what more can you ask for?)

Story mode looks a bit monotonous, in fact I don't even know idf there really is a story to it, it just seems to be a bunch of unrelated missions each designed to help Naruto train, but I haven't seen a lot of it to get a sense of whether there is a coherent story. But it seems to have some fun and quirky bits to it, and some of the challenges are pretty difficult to get the bonus elements, so it's got a bit of replay value if you want to totally clock the game. The boss fights usually have a number of QTEs so you need to be at least OK with QTEs for the game to be worth getting.

Fighting looks pretty fun with relatively simple controls, but not too simple. With the support character feature of the fighting mode it adds to the variation. Each character has their signature style and moves so there is tons of variety in the fighting. 2-player fighting would be fun for well matched players. The good thing about the fighting challenges in story mode is that you don't have to fight as Naruto, so you can pick your favourite characters. My 13-year old likes to use the man in the green jumpsuit with the bowl cut hairstyle. His ultimate Jiutsu move is pretty funny.

The game seems to have done a really good job of capturing the personalities of the characters, and I assume they use the same voice actors from the (English translated) TV series.

Not sure if it's worth the full price. But it doesn't matter for us because we picked it up used off Trademe (which is our equivalent of eBay). It didn't come with the game manual, but that didn't seem to cause any problems with getting the hang of the game.

I think the Metascore is probably a fair reflection of the worth of the game. Though my sons would probably give it a higher score, but what do you expect from 11 and 13-year olds?