Naruto - Ultimate Ninja 2

The first Ultimate Ninja was a fighter that looked like the show and played like a rough draft. Its sequel, released in Japan as Naruto: Narutimate Hero 2 and built by CyberConnect2 for Namco Bandai, is where the idea began to settle. Arenas are bigger and more varied, the cast is deeper, and the fights finally feel like they are going somewhere.

The core of the combat is simple on purpose. You string together light attack combos, throw shuriken and kunai from range, guard, and spend chakra on special moves and a transformation or awakening state when your health gets low. Throws and substitution jutsu keep the guard game from becoming a wall. Characters share most of the same inputs, so learning the roster is a matter of timing and spacing rather than memorizing command lists. That makes it approachable, and it is also why the depth runs out sooner than in a Tekken or a Virtua Fighter.

What the game gets right is the show's rhythm. Special attacks cut to short cinematic finishers, and the cel-shaded models hold up well even by the standards of later hardware. Fans of the anime will notice how much effort went into making the signature techniques look the way they do on screen, and that effort is what the game is really selling.

The single-player side leans on a story mode that follows the early arcs of the series, linking fights with text and board-style map progression. It is more padding than drama, and the stretches between battles can feel slow if you only want to fight. Versus play with a second player is where the game is at its best, because two people who know the characters can turn a mediocre ruleset into something loose and fun.

It is not a deep fighter, and it never pretended to be. As a licensed game from the PS2 years, though, it understood what the audience wanted and mostly gave it to them, which was rarer than it should have been.