Naruto: Rise of a Ninja was created exclusively for the XBox 360 my Ubisoft Montreal. It was released October 30th, 2007 in the U.S. and November 2nd in Europe.

Story: 12 years ago, a nine-tailed fox demon attacked Leaf Village. It was stopped by a powerful ninja, called a “Hokage”. While unable to kill the spirit, the Hokage was able to bind it inside the body of a newborn — but in doing so, the Hokage died. That newborn’s name was Naruto Uzumaki. Naruto grew up shunned by the people of the Leaf Village, all of them aware that the Hokage sacrificed his life to trap the fox demon (though Naruto is unaware of this at first). Despite this, Naruto aspires to become a Hokage one day, and is determined to earn the respect of everybody in Leaf Village. Naruto must progress in his ninja training, as well as complete tasks for the villagers, before he can earn their respect and the respect of his fellow students.

Naruto’s story follows that of the early anime series as Naruto begins training as a ninja. I’ve never watched the series, so I can’t tell you how faithfully the game recreates events and characters, but it does a decent job of introducing the major players. Even though I’m not familiar with the anime, I could tell that later cutscenes and character introductions were badly rushed, as the developers decided to focus mainly on Naruto’s story while ignoring the development of the side characters.

Graphics: Naruto features very nice cell-shaded graphics, giving Leaf Village and its surrounding forest the look of a living, breathing cartoon. Everything is bright, vivid, and detailed, and really stands out in high definition. The cut scenes, though, are taken from the anime series, and really pale to the in-game graphics. They’re darker, grainer, and overall look quite poor on an HDTV.

Gameplay: Naruto features two distinct styles of play. Most of the time, you’ll be running and jumping through Leaf Village and its surrounding area in your typical 3-D platform manner. Whenever you encounter and enemy — bandits and rival ninja — the game will switch to a Tekken-like fighting mode, where you must drain your opponents’ life bar in order to win.

The platforming engine was surprisingly well done, as jumping and running through the large village felt natural from the very start. At the very beginning you have a basic jump and can run at a normal speed, but you’ll soon learn the valued and physics defying double jump as well as the high-speed dash. While in platform mode, you’ll be carrying out tasks for the villagers such as retrieving lost items, pets, or people. When you complete these tasks, the villagers will warm up to you, and will even point you in the right direction should you get lost. You’ll also earn money to spend, extra health, and points to spend on upgrades. Scattered throughout the game are coins which you can trade in for health-replenishing ramen noodles to ability enhancing scrolls. There are also several minigames in the village as well which increase your respect, such as hide-and-seek, ramen noodle delivery, checkpoint races, and curing lovelorn villager’s broken hearts with your Sexy Jutsu.

The Jutsus — magical ninja techniques — help you out with some of your tasks. The aforementioned Sexy Jutsu temporarily changes you into a beautiful, naked (with strategically placed clouds) girl — the very sight alone will cause the lovestruck villagers to literally fall over with excitement. You also have the Shadow Clone Jutsu, which can grant you access to hidden areas, and the Concentration Jutsu, which lets you climb steep buildings and eventually to walk on water.

The Jutsus can also be used in the fighting sections, though I found them to be mostly worthless. To me, the entire fighting system is too fast, too unpredictable, and too unbalanced to call any good. Most fights can be won by button mashing, or finding one particular move and spamming it until your opponent is defeated. You can block and teleport behind your opponent by pressing the B button, but the chances of actually doing that seem about 50-50.

Sound: The music is catchy, ranging from upbeat and peppy to “moody, late 80’s direct-to-Cinemax Hong Kong detective movie theme”. Voice over work seems to be done by the English cast of the series, so it’s your typical anime dubbing job — average, but not awful.

Multiplayer: Remember those awful fighting sections I just finished talking about? You can take the fight online against other players, where you can play as Naruto or several other of the cast members. These fights seem to be paced better, as you’re not fighting the twitchy AI. However, it still boils down to strategic button mashing.

Achievements: Naruto features the typical achievements for completing certain story missions, as well as finishing all of the various minigames. However — and this is my beef with many games — there’s far too many multiplayer achievements for a mode that isn’t that good. For a full and detailed list, hit up the fine folks at XBox360Achievements.org.

Intangibles: From the main menu, you can download an exclusive character that can be used in the multiplayer portion of the game. WATCH OUT! This file is glitched, and will cause your game to freeze if you happen to hit a tripwire or swinging log in the game. In order to avoid this, either do not download this file, or download the free “Jiraiya & Sarutobi” trial pack from Marketplace for the fix. I only found out about this after I returned the game to Gamefly, and not from an official source — I found it on the game’s Wikipedia page. It seems to me that Ubisoft could easily fix this with an automatic title update, but I guess they’re content to let gamers get frustrated over their glitched programming.

- If you don’t like the English voices, you can download the original Japanese voice-overs from Marketplace. It’s free, but it also requires the “Jiraiya & Sarutobi” character pack.

- This has nothing to do with Naruto, but since Ubisoft made this game, here’s something I’d like to ask them: Why aren’t you guys making Beyond Good & Evil 2?

The Bottom Line: Naruto is an 85% good game, as the platforming section is very solid and enjoyable. I’d really like to see more platform games based on Naruto’s engine, as I think it’s that good. The fighting portions aren’t too good, but at least they’re few and far between. Overall, Naruto is an enjoyable experience, and fares much better than your typical licensed game. I would definitely recommend this game as a rental, as you can easily take care of everything in a weekend’s worth of moderate playing.

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5. The Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Review

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