Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm - Generations

First of all I have to say, I LOVED Naruto Shippuden Ultimate Ninja Storm 2, so when I bought this game I was expecting a similar if not better game.
What I liked about this game's predecessor what the almost Final Fantasy style story mode with almost tekken style combat. So you can imagine my disappointment when I realised that the Story Mode is essentially gone; now you can play each characters 'story' which consists of;

An opening animation,
Narrated, still images
Several battles, much like Tekken's arcade mode; with each battle getting more difficult,
An ending animation and the unlocking of other character stories...

There's no running around freely, no side quests; just battles and narrated still images. ANOTHER criticism I have on the story mode is that there's just no scope for the actual story. I happen to really enjoy the Manga and Anime, so I know what's supposed to be going on, which means as I watch important parts of the story being completely missed it does irritate me a little.

So the story mode; awful, really disappointed.

As for battles, it's a good thing I'm really enjoying them at least; I haven't played online yet, so I don't know what that will be like, but against the Com I feel like the battle system has improved well enough. It takes a bit to get used to the new substitution technique but once that's done it actually makes the battles more challenging and enjoyable.

Well that's it for my review, I'll just spilt my rating slightly

Story Mode: 2/5
Battles: 4/5 (I'm knocking a mark off here because it had the cheek to offer to lower the difficulty for me o_0)

Naruto Generations, the game promised a lot of things, large character selection, 'better' online modes and over ten characters from the Naruto universe each get their own dedicated tale in story mode with up to 60 minutes of 'new' anime cutscenes. This all sounds good, right? Well its was over hyped thats for sure, lets start off with the good points for *cough* Storm 2.5 *cough* I mean Generations.

The Good points:
A very large character selection, with exactly 72 playable characters, few of the characters do have alternate costumes with different ultimates. I think playing all of these characters (most) are pretty fun, its good when offline you get challenged with the CPU at the right difficulty (hard or super hard). The new free battle modes added such as Survival, Tournament and training mode are fun at first, with Survival you start doing introduction survival, very easy but after that it gets tougher and tougher:

- Survival : It involves beating characters back to back, after you win each fight you get a small percentage of health added depending on how well you fought them. Also you get bonus conditions sometimes on the 4th or 5th match, if you meet one or two of these conditions during said match, you get a small health boost from those too. Again its fun on the right difficulty like hard or super hard.

- Tournament : As it says on the tin, you can do two types of tournaments offline, challenge tournaments which involve fighting a set group of fighters, these battle tournaments or separated into four tiers : Genin-Chunin-Jonin-Hokage. Each rank has its own difficulty level. The other type is battle tournaments, 4-8 players/CPU fight against each other you choose who to fight. Basically a larger Vs mode, but challenge tournaments are better to play.

- Training mode : Just to train, you can set your health on awakening level heath, you can test your characters moveset out and even play in your characters awakening and maintain it, so this allows you to see combos and jutsus your awakening can do. I think it would be useful to practice for online, IF there wasn't a handful of problems with it. But useful to get the most out of your favourite characters movesets,justsu and so on.

- Shop : The shop is now separate in the game select mode, you can be different kinds of substitution logs (such as tonton, make out series books instead of just a plain log), Ninja info cards, these play slightly bigger role in this game than in storm 2, they can help boost the attributes of your characters varying on the card you select, some will have one enhancement like Ulitmate team justu enhanced (little/slight/medium/great/huge) and so on. These cards can also be earned through offline and online tournament. Other features involve buying the ninja tools to customise your characters ninja tool palette as well as buying your titles you can put on your ninja info card (i.e Glasses wearing - Demon). This is good, its less confusing and the game select mode itself is more simple to know where things are in this game.

Those are good points of offline modes, these new modes do give more longevity to the game and gives some more replay value, especially if your playing with a few friends.The good points online are only the 'improvements' they made to the combat system, I feel that adding a substitution bar and separating it from the chakra bar was good, it gives the game more strategy or another layer to its simple yet complicated combat system, well for offline or playing with friends anyway.However there is a few times where online can be enjoyable, which I have experienced as it can be a very enjoyable game if people play fair. This is where the good points END.

The Bad points:
Oh where to start, 'story' mode is nothing but over 10 characters that have their own story to tell, these involve a small anime cutscene at the beginning of each one, most of these are not that interesting, they are not that long either. Except of Killer Bee's story anime cutscenes. The rest of these stories of each character ALL involve 2d still images, with narration from a few Naruto characters. It consists of just battles, anime cutscenes and 2d still images and there are NO BOSS BATTLES in this game, just to warn you, its just Vs fight after fight for each characters story, it gets boring pretty fast, but you have to play to unlock the newer characters. The online, well where do I start, the constant blocking with the R2 button while trying to attack, is annoying and then they either spam grab or spamming the same justu or Ultimate jutsu gets annoying over time. I will say that if your looking for a fun and fair match, you will have a hard time to find someone who fights fair sometimes and doesn't pick the same character and spam every few seconds. The tournaments online are hell, so far bumping into people who spam again. However spectator mode is good as you can see how the other players fight and may help you win against them its a nice feature, but again almost worthless if your going to be facing a player that spams the same moves over and over.Also their is still issues with lag from other players facing you, which make you get thrown off while trying to make the combo, this can easily make or break a match and not entirely fair for someone who actually has skill and doesn't spam and block to win. Those are the bad points so far.And people please don't abuse the block, it gets very annoying very fast!!!

Overall I'd say they were bold trying this out by separating both chakra and substitution bars, it does make it fun offline and sometimes online. Yes their are issues with spammers online, which I thought would be fixed or decreased when this game came out. But the improvements for online are obvious for outside of the battles, you can buy replay tickets (up to 99 max) to save, record,view yourself and upload you battles online for people in Naruto Generation online community to see, which is nice feature to have. This game is ok, but I would either wait if it drops in price, rent it from somewhere or borrow it from someone you know, its still NOT as good as storm 2 for story mode, but this game beats storm 2 for larger character selection and more longevity for offline and online modes with tournaments and survival modes.

3.5 stars out of 5.0 stars.

Oh dear oh dear... After a hot streak of releases in the form of the two previous Ultimate Ninja Storm games and the excellent PSP spinoff Ultimate Ninja Impact, it looks like the folks over at CyberConnect2 have decided to phone things in big style with this new release. The fights are as fluid and accessable as ever, but the problem is this time... there's nothing else BUT the fights, leaving this feeling very much like a stripped down package compared to it's predecessors, which offered a nice variety in adventure modes and mini games as well as the fights. No longer sadly.

I won't get into the plot as I'm sure everyone knows what Naruto is about by this point: Ninja kid with a mythical fox monster sealed inside his body aims to become the greatest Pokemon master of them all or something. The ground covered in this game's story mode actually covers more of the overall Naruto plot than any one Naruto game has ever done in the past, going as it does from the very start with Naruto as a kid right up until the Kage Summit arc of Naruto Shippuden, which is a fairly enormous amount of story ground overall... however, even with that, the story mode here is actually considerably SHORTER than the story mode in the previous UNS game. Obviously this is more down to the removal of the adventure segments than anything, but at the same time, the story is presented in such a heavily streamlined form that it will make absolutely no sense at all if you don't already know the story beforehand. The story mode is structured around you selecting a particular character from a small selection of about 8 total that unlock as you go and when you pick that character you get a series of fights linked by still pictures from the Naruto anime with voiced dialogue which 'frames' each fight for you in as abridged a manner as possible. In addition, each character's story arc is bookended by an opening and ending piece of animation from the studio that makes the Naruto anime, all of which are brand new and actually provide some fairly interesting backstory to some of the characters and general wider continuity. I particularly enjoyed one of the animated sequences which shows the legendary fight between the First Hokage and Madara Uchiha, a battle that has been fairly significant to the Naruto story, but was never actually shown in any real form before this game, and it does look fantastic too. Saying that, it still doesn't make up for how bare bones the story mode is otherwise. I completed it fully with all characters inside 7 hours, which is maybe a third the amount of time I got out of UNS2's story mode. There are some long overdue additional modes added in like survival and tournament modes in addition to the story mode, as well as the online multiplayer (Which, while improved a bit over UNS2, still feels a bit limited), but if you aren't planning on making heavy use of the multiplayer, then I think you may end up getting a bit sick of the game before it's even lasted you HALF as long as it's predecessor.

As stated, the game still plays great, with only minor changes having been made since the last game. Of particular note is the addition of a seperate 'substitution' meter that determines how many times you can use your substitution jutsu in a match (Subs now being mapped to their own button as well incidentally), meaning no more endlessly spamming this maneuver to dodge attacks... just lots of having to watch as an opponent catches you in a combo that is ridiculously long and damaging, being helpless to do anything to make it stop. This can get very annoying at times. The roles of the 'support' characters has also been expanded a bit, with bonuses offered for pairing certain characters together in a group (Example: using Naruto as your fighter and pairing him up with Sasuke and Sakura as support characters will give your squad the title "Team 7", and cause your support gauge to fill much faster) and you now able to initiate 'team ultimate jutsus' that sees your entire squad do a massive combo finisher on the enemy. Nice touch, but ultimately a bit unnecessary in my eyes given how powerful the individual characters' finishers already are on their own. Beyond that, there isn't much else to say about the gameplay. There's a variety of modes and multiplayer elements, as well as collectibles to be bought at the shop accessed from the main menu, paid for with cash you earn for every fight... but for the first time in this series, there's no actual gameplay that isn't fights, and as a result this leaves the game feeling very sparse and limited in my eyes, and it gets boring a LOT faster than it's predecessors ever did. Basically, the gameplay IS good enough, but there's very little left to do once you're run through the stories and extra modes once (Which will take around 15-20 hours total at most).

On the technical front, the game is as pretty as the past two games, but with the exclusion of the visually spectacular boss fights that were the highlight of those games, this title is probably the most visually "dull" of the bunch. The character models are near flawless, the stages are beautifully designed and the animation is as fluid and detailed as ever... but when I sit through a recap of the Naruto plotline that excludes any and all battles involving summoned creatures like Gamabunta or the Tailed beasts then that's an experience that's missing some crucial ingredients. The soundtrack is very good, but mostly seems made up of tunes from the previous games. Voice acting is as great as ever in Japanese, and too many characters grate badly in the english dub, most especially Naruto himself.

There's fun to be had, but even at the height of what it has to offer, Generations never matches up to the masterclass in anime based gaming that was Ultimate Ninja Storm 2. There's just too little variety here for a game that is essentially a 'greatest hits' compilation of what was already in the first two games and the story adaptation is extremely poorly handled aside from the superb new anime shorts included. The inclusion of additional modes like survival and tournament battles may be long overdue, but when they come at the cost of an otherwise cheap cash grab of a game then there's no escaping the danger that the Naruto game series could be heading for the same cynical recycled content approach to game design that makes up the Dragonball Z titles these days.