Naruto: The Broken Bond

Only available on: Xbox 360
Played it for: 40 hours

RATING: 6.5/10

Summary:
Naruto: The Broken Bond follows the story of the original Naruto series by Masashi Kishimoto. Naruto Uzumaki is a wild child, seeking to become the next Hokage (leader) of his village. However, while Naruto has a lot of ambition, he is quite lacking in skill. As the game progresses, Naruto and his friends and fellow squad members, Sasuke Uchiha and Sakura Haruno, go on many missions together, and continually improve through hard work and dedication. Eventually, Naruto is taken under the wing of a mysterious Sage Ninja named Jiraya, and Naruto finally feels that he can surpass his greatest rival, Sasuke. However, just before he can issue a challenge, Sasuke leaves the village in search of a dark power.

Review:
This game is very iffy.
While I am a Naruto fan, this game just doesn't do it for me. I will admit, the very open and large campaign world did impress me a lot, and it is definitely the most open Naruto game I have ever played, the rest of the game comes across as very... mediocre. First off, the graphics are quite bad. It seems like Ubisoft didn't really spend much time on this, and just tried to release the game on alpha software. The characters faces don't move at all when they are speaking except for their lower jaws moving up and down in the same motion, without even a hint of forming actual words. Second, for those who want to play the game with English voices, the mouths of the characters are timed to the Japanese voices, so this just makes it look even worse when someone is speaking. The movements of the characters also work in a similar fashion, looking stiff and controlled, and nothing like they should.

VS Mode:
This is the worst part.
The fighting mechanic works as if it was an afterthought. It's almost like Ubisoft had a week until the release and said, "Hey, uh, you know we just came out with a fighting game, right? Well, we forgot to include any fighting in it, so uh, whoever can come up with a shoddy, but working fighting mechanic in the next hour gets a cookie." The character controls are even more stiff in the fighting portion of the game, and the controls get incredibly sticky and unresponsive. If that wasn't bad enough, the enemies in the game know how to work the system perfectly, using substitutions and jutsu time after time. What ends up happening is you just continually pressing the same combination of XXXY, and spamming the enemy until they can't stand anymore. Honestly, it gets very boring.

I understand that Broken Bond was only the second Naruto game that Ubisoft had published, but they really should have just left it to the the pros at CyberConnect2 and BanDai. If you want a good Naruto game, quite literally any of the Ultimate Ninjas for PS2 or Ultimate Ninja Storms for PS3/Xbox would do you well.