The balance isn’t perfect: at the start of the game, there’s an illusion of freedom that soon gets confusingly taken away. You’ll find that watching and playing Ultimate Adventure will feel as close to watching the anime as a game can get, with a well adapted story, beautiful 3D cel-shaded visuals, and nice little touches to the presentation reminiscent of CyberConnect2’s other cinematic action title, Asura’s Wrath. The true leader of this group, the so-called Madara Uchiha, has inexplicably come from the past with big plans: plans that tie into Naruto’s origins and the events that led him to where he is now. At the same time, the dangerous organization called the Akatsuki, who were previously thought to be led by Pain, ramp up their efforts to steal power, which leads to a huge shinobi world war. Ultimate Ninja Storm 3‘s story mode, Ultimate Adventure, picks up directly after the fight with Pain, with Naruto a hero of the Leaf Village, and who’s finally earned the respect of the villagers. This leads into a summary of the events of Part 2, depicting an older Naruto who’s come back from training three years later, up until his fight with a major enemy named Pain, which was covered in Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 2.
To help catch you up, there’s actually a nice, concise summary of Part 1 as the game installs, the era of the series that depicts a younger Naruto and his earlier adventures as a novice ninja. This means more action, more narrative, and far, far less boring tree-hopping scenes.
Keep in mind that most of those scenes were added to pad the story and make it longer, which the game actually avoids: you’re actually getting a story more in-tune with the manga than the anime. CyberConnect2 has had a lot of experience with the Narutoverse, and while you may miss some neat little scenes that were created for the anime, you’re not missing much. But like previous games, Ultimate Ninja Storm 3 serves as a sort of Cliff Notes version of the story, distilling the narrative so that players get the main points of the story without detracting from the quality.īefore any purists go nuts, let me say that this is a good thing.
This is no easy task: the franchise has been around for more than a decade, with more than 600 manga chapters, more than 500 anime episodes, nine movies, and hundreds of characters. Ultimate Ninja Storm 3 isn’t quite perfect, but it may be the best title the series has seen so far.įor newcomers fresh to the manga or anime, fret not: while you may not completely understand the mechanics of the Naruto universe, Ultimate Ninja Storm 3 does put some effort into helping you catch up. The latest game, Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 3, doesn’t disappoint, returning to the big, epic, cinematic fights of the previous games (which were sorely missed in Generations), and bringing even more characters and improvements along with it. When it comes to adapting anime for video games, CyberConnect2 has had a pretty good track record, the Naruto series among their best.