Naruto: Clash of Ninja Revolution

November 1,2007 - Naruto is back to fight his friends and enemies some more, this time on the Wii. With new stages, characters, and new control schemes, it looks like Naruto: Clash of Ninja Revolution has the makings of a great welcoming party for the series to the Wii. Is Naruto the fighter to get this fall or is it just fodder to mess with until Super Smash Brothers Brawl comes out next year?

The fact that the Naruto anime's storyline in the US is way behind where it is in Japan causes a few problems for the localization of the games for the US audience. This means that since the GameCube is dead, what would have been the third and fourth Clash of Ninja games will have to be ported to the Wii using the engine of the first Wii Naruto game in Japan. That means that Revolution is basically an upgraded port of what would have been Clash of Ninja 3, though the main drawback is that a few characters were sacrificed to make that happen. Zabuza, Haku, Iruka, Mizuki, Choji, Kiba, and the Third Hokage are the main characters that don’t make an appearance in Revolution, though new characters like Itachi, Kisame, Tsunade, Jiraiya, Shino, and Temari make up for it enough so that there should be a favorite character for everyone to find. Overall, there are about 21 characters to fight with in this game, though you need to unlock the majority of them by playing the mission and single-player modes quite a bit. The next game needs to step up and deliver as big of a roster as what the fourth Clash of Ninja game in Japan offers and not drop characters because of their relevance to the anime’s storyline.

The stages in Clash of Ninja Revolution offer a few cool new features that helps open up the multiplayer fighting to even more chaos than before. The first thing you’ll notice are the obstacles in the stages, which offer some strategy, as you can hide behind them like a shield or use them to launch surprise attacks at an enemy. Along with that are the secondary stages, which you can reach by knocking an enemy at certain edges of a stage to trigger a transitional cutscene, where you also have the ability to attack your enemy as they fly over to the next stage. Of course, your enemy also has the ability to recover and dodge that attack, making this cutscene a modified rock-paper-scissors kind of mini-game that can appear during battle. Some of these stages were brought back from what is the third Clash of Ninja game in Japan, though there’s a good amount of new arenas that keep things fresh, aesthetically, which is one of the nicest improvements to the game over its Japanese counterpart.

As far as the fighting’s concerned, Naruto: Clash of Ninja Revolution is a well-balanced fighter, so much so that even the license isn’t the only reason to play the game. Itachi and Kisame are the only characters who can be called cheap when put up against the rest of the cast, but even then, skilled players can take them down with a good plan. Single-player’s not the best way to play the game, as the AI’s not all that great of a challenge for most players, but there are plenty of modes to keep you busy for awhile. The mission mode offers the Naruto storyline and corresponding fights that are the basis of unlocking most of the rest of the content that the game offers. Along with that are the single-player, time attack, survival, and standard versus modes that pit you against the CPU. The multiplayer modes are where the action is, with up to four players being able to duke it out on teams or on their own.  Two players can also work together in a four-player survival mode to see how far they can go against CPU teams. Mini-games are the big addition to the game in terms of modes that take advantage of the Wii controls, which includes a Shuriken Training, Shadow Clone, and Rasengan mini-games. They work well for what they are, but won’t be something you’ll play much more than a few times at first.

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