It’s the very definition of a guilty pleasure, so it’s unfortunate that every time the game drops you into one of its empty environments it just slows the pace and gives the guilt time to set in right next to that pleasure. It’s dumb, it’s clichéd, it’s cheesy, but… but Sakura just said she loves Naruto and I know that can’t be true, what is she playing at? It’s all so addictive. The relentless pace is effective at heightening the drama while lessening our critical thinking. The story works best when it barrels through the plot like a runaway boulder, and you don’t have time to think what with all the melodramatic chaos. Would you rather watch a fun cut scene or play a dull game? I’d rather watch the wonderfully ridiculous cut scenes that solidify Naruto as a ninja-based soap opera. I understand that these sections of the game are probably meant to break up the cut scenes, which can stretch on for a very long time, but this raises a question.
Levels only get worse later on: At least the developers tried to make the village feel big, most areas are just straight paths. This is the extent of your interaction with the environments: you run through them. With nothing else to do, I left the Hidden Leaf Village. When I did get a brief chance to explore, I found all of one sidequest: an item hunt that can never really be completed. I was forced to follow the objective arrows. So naturally I wanted to explore, but the moment that I tried to go left instead of right, the game stopped me. The game gives you an objective, but also tells you about sidequests and hidden items, the kinds of things that have been encouraging players to explore digital environments for decades. You begin in the Hidden Leaf Village, a fairly big place filled with shops and people. It’s not just a series of fights broken up by cut scenes (like most fighting games) and that ambition to do something more is respectable. Unlike Ultimate Ninja Storm Generations, which was the last Naruto game that I played, Ultimate Ninja Storm 3 has actual 3D environments that you can explore. However, it quickly loses sight of that ambition, and you can feel the developer’s own apathy sink in almost immediately. Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 3 begins with the hint of something ambitious: an anime-licensed game that’s more RPG than fighting game (the vast majority of anime-licensed games are the latter).
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