Naruto: Ninja Destiny (DS)
Finally, some z-axis fighting on the DS.
3/19/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 2 of 2
What's Hot: The first 3-D fighter in the almost three-and-a-half year history of the DS.
What's Not: Controls will limit what you can do in battle and the lack of game depth will limit how long you'll battle.
Steve Steinberg
Status: Waffles and Pancakes are made from the same thing: deliciousness.
What separates this fighter from the GameCube's Naruto-based Clash of Ninja games is the use of the second screen. Here, just like in
Bleach, it's used to call up wild cards. These are power-ups that influence the way your chosen Ninja gets his or her stuff done. Power-ups can do anything from restore your health and chakra meters to bolster your attack and defense skills. While the power-ups do add a bit of strategy to the fighting, the arbitrary nature of how they show up doesn't make the best use of them. At the beginning of each battle, you get six random power-ups with which to play. In
Bleach, increasingly cooler power-up cards are won during gameplay. Constructing decks of your best cards is a way to make sure you can use the best power-ups during battle. This collecting and constructing element adds a depth that's just lacking in
Ninja Destiny.
Another thing that's lacking is a decent variety of things to do. This is one short game. It will take you all of 20 minutes to blow through the initial Story Mode. The Story -- which is little more than short narrative scenes that pop up between scrapes -- is comprised of 10 fights. You'll fight as Naruto. You'll fight as Sasuke. You'll fight against Naruto. You'll fight against Sasuke. Once you beat the Story Mode, you'll want to hit the Battle Mode, where you can either go up against the opponent of your choice or you can pick one fighter and try to make it through 10 straight fights. Wirelessly, you can take on a pal. Some tweaks on the basic fighting game -- different fight modes, the ability to customize characters -- would have added a lot of replay value.
Naruto games have been hitting the shelves at rate of roughly one every 11 days. At last count there were almost a dozen and a half ways for gamers to virtually control their chakra power. While the annoying-voiced ninja has represented himself well on the big consoles -- I thought
Rise of a Ninja for the Xbox 360 was especially cool -- handheld takes on the Naruto world have been less successful.
Ninja Destiny bags the quasi-fighter feel of the Ninja Council games and the RPG qualities of
Path of the Ninja to deliver fighting action -- complete with a z-axis. The fighting is promising, but still feels somewhat incomplete. That said, it does show that 3-D fighting is doable on the DS.
Ninja Destiny isn't the ultimate way to be scraping in three dimensions, but right now it's the only way to do it on Nintendo's handheld. For that alone, it's worth a look.
This review was based on a retail copy of the game supplied by the publisher.
