

Visually, the title offers well-drawn backgrounds, and the scene transitions when a character is knocked into the adjoining battlefield are done with surprising clarity. The unfortunate truth is, while Naruto: Clash of Ninja Revolution does some things right, every aspect of the game has some significant flaw. (The fourth hokage died while sealing the spirit of the nine-tailed fox inside Naruto.) The story stops where Jiraiya, Naruto's tutor, teams up with Tsunade to fight Orochimaru, the snake-obsessed orchestrator of the attack upon Naruto's hometown who perpetually seeks immortality and every jutsu he can get his hands on. The plotline progresses through the disruption of those exams, the death of the third hokage (village leader) and the subsequent recruitment of Tsunade, a healer who has been selected by the village to be the fifth hokage. As the story begins, the students are training against one another in hopes to improve their abilities before the final round.

Each of the students who passed the preliminary rounds is slated to be pitted against one another, with relationships put to the test, startling powers pitted against one another and ambitions at an all-time high. This title begins the story shortly after the preliminaries for the Chunin exam, the test that Naruto's ninja class has to take in order to proceed to the next ranking of ninja. Naruto: Clash of Ninja Revolution is the latest of the fighting games, and while it offers serviceable gameplay for the most part, the simple, disappointing fact is that it does very little to distance itself in any appreciable way from other titles in the series. While the stretching of the franchise into the more esoteric forms of gameplay has almost universally resulted in experiences that will cause you to revisit your lunch, most of the fighting games have proven to be adequate.

There are the Naruto fighting games, generally lauded as playable titles for the most part, and there is the occasional foray into other genres, like role-playing games or card battling. It seems like Naruto games come in two styles these days.
