One month after our  sneak peek of the game, here’s our video review of Naruto Shippuden Ultimate Ninja Storm 4. Take a glimpse to see the the finale of Naruto’s story animated for the first time and find out if the game is worth your time.
When you start up the story for Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm 4, the first thing that you’d want to do is play the story mode, which takes place after the final fight you get to play in Ultimate Ninja Storm 3 and continues through to the end of the canon manga series. If you had played through the story of Ultimate Ninja Storm 3, you can remember how nicely rendered and how much they actually covered in the game that surpassed even the anime and manga in some respects. However in this game, the presentation in story mode could have been better. The first several chapters are told mostly through stills of the Naruto Shippuden anime with a couple of animated filters overlayed on top.
It’s a little dissapointing, however once you get past the latter half of the story mode, the game starts to get told almost exclusively through the in-game cutscenes once again. The biggest reason for that is more than likely because the scenes depicted haven’t even been animated into the offical anime as of yet. When it story mode gets to these scenes, it once again does a decent job showing off the main story that the fans should expect from these games. However, if this is your first time diving into not only the series of Naruto games or even the story in general, you may feel lost at many different points while playing. The game assumes you’ve either kept up with the games, anime or even the manga and leaves a couple of things unanswered. This game’s story mode is meant for Naruto fans who had been waiting to see the closing volumes of the manga animated, or anime fans who want to see the series’ climax animated but not wait for filler to end.
When you choose each stage in the story, it’s actually represented as a physical timeline of the official story. It’s great because it eliminates the needless running around from one part of the game to another like in the older games. You want the next battle, then just pick it and go. What even better is that it actually gives you an estimated time of completion for each stage and fight.
There’s also another mode that more closely resembles the gameplay of the previous Ultimate Ninja Storm game simply called Adventure mode. Adventure Mode takes place after the main story mode and in it you can run around in an original story that just ammounts to Naruto recollecting previous events in the anime and manga. Some fights like Naruto vs Neji and Lee vs Gaara during the Chuunin Exams from the first half of the series are playable, but it doesn’t have any of the same cinematic presentation that you would see in the main story mode. Honestly it’s mostly a mode for players to go through who want to 100% the game’s collectables, otherwise you can probably just skip it altogether.
The gameplay is actually about the same as it was for most of the previous Ultimate Ninja Storm games. There are one or two mechanics that you do get in new game such as armor breaking, however it doesn’t seem like there’s ever much of a difference in gameplay other than a visual representation of how long the current fight has progressed. There are other moments where you control the game in different and new ways like a few moments where you fight scores of enemies like in a muso game (example: Dynasty Warriors).
The biggest change could arguably be the way Team Battles work. You can finally switch on the fly which character you want to control rather than be limited to one character and one or two stiker characters who only perform one move before leaving again. With just the flick of the right stick, you can tag out completely and start fighting with a new character and thus allowing you to play with more of the roster at once. It’s still the first one to get knocked out loses the match, but if you switch to another character, you can prolong the fight a little more to try to regain the upper hand.
Graphically, this is the best looking Naruto game if you can ignore the filtered anime it seems that the beginning of the story mode. From looking at only the gameplay perspective the game looks gorgeous. The effects that you see while playing like Wind Fire or water is used in a special attack it looks amazing
Things that could be better is actually still the game play. Since it plays exactly like the older games, you’ll find yourself mashing the attack button over and over again. You can try to use some of the other combos that are available in the game but in the end you’ll just keep spending the same move over and over again in multiplayer and single-player. Another thing that could have been better is the online multiplayer. According to early reports the net code was supposed to be really good however everytime I try to connect to match it never started.
Other than that the biggest gripe with this game is the overall presentation of the story mode. You Have to go through at least 65% of the story before look at the good cutscenes. Which is a significant step back after playing the last game. It was what drew me into the games and even back into the series in the first place. Backing away and using only still images for the first half seriously hindered the initial internet that I had for the game.
At the end of it all I would still recommend this game. Currently Naruto Shippuden Ultimate Ninja Storm 4 is the only way to see any animation of the final Arc of the series considering how far behind the official anime is to the finished manga. It may not be worth grabbing at full price so wait for sale to pick this one up. However if you want to see the final Arc of Naruto animated without having to wait for several episodes of filler to air this game will give you what you’re looking for.
