Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Heroes isn’t at all different from the Ultimate Ninja series. The PSP game is essentially a scaled down, portable version of the Playstation 2 series with nearly identical moves. On one hand the graphics and fluid control are impressive for a portable fighting game. On the other hand you’re playing Naruto: Ultimate Ninja 1.5, again. Also compared to Naruto: Narultimate Portable, which Namco Bandai released in Japan last year, Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Heroes’ single player mode feels watered down.
Let’s outline what Naruto: Ultimate Ninja does different first. The key feature is you have a three man cell instead of a single ninja in Heroes Mode. You can take preset teams like Team Kakashi (Naruto, Sakura and Sasuke) into matches or form your own dream team with Gaara, Hinata and Shikamaru. The choice is yours, but you get a better team attack if you opt for a preset team. For example, if you group Ino, Shikamaru and Choji together they have an ability to boost speed and defense for all three characters in a single fight. A mixed team only gets a passive ability that grants them spikes to throw. Before battles begin you can use your special moves like Saskue’s Chidori to instantly wipe out 33% of an enemy’s life bar or Kakashi’s Make out Paradise to recover his chakra. You can only use these bonuses once per round of Heroes mode, but the CPU opponents take advantage of them every round to make matches more difficult.
After you choose attacks and order from menus it’s time to get down to fighting, one on one fighting. While you have three characters, you can’t switch them on the fly. You start with the first character you selected and you continue pummeling the other three fighters. When you knockout the first opponent you get a bit of healing and continue using your first character. If your first character gets knocked out you move on the next in the line-up. Essentially, Heroes Mode gives you three lives and small health boosts similar to a survival mode. The engine is nearly identical to the other Ultimate Ninja games, except each character only has one secret technique that takes up all their chakra. Sasuke has the chidori reserved here, Gaara uses his Sand Coffin technique and Shino uses a spear made out of his insects. Using your special move often grants a bonus like throwing a character into ultimate mode or in the case of Choji expanding his body size to take up half of the screen. For some strange reason Naruto does not have the rasengan in Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Heroes, even though it is an integral part of the previous story arc. Instead Naruto has a Nine Tails Barrage as his secret technique and a jutsu where he farts.
Winning fights in Heroes mode earns you new characters. The first time through you get Kakashi and Guy. Later you unlock Gaara and the Sannin through longer, increasingly difficult missions. You also earn colored scrolls each time you win Heroes mode. These scrolls are required to try out the extra missions inside the promotion test, which is like the mission mode in the Ultimate Ninja series. These bonus fights have requirements like winning a match with 2/3rds of your chakra or winning a fight where the opponent has an attack bonus. Heroes mode has similar “requirements” too, but they are optional achievements that earn points so you can level up your characters.
Speaking of characters Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Heroes actually has less than its Japanese counterpart, Naruto: Narultimate Portable. The third Hokage, Kabuto and Shizune didn’t make the list. There are fewer stages too in Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Heroes too. Some of the exclusive levels found in the Japanese PSP like the ancient tower game got cut. The omission of the levels is understandable because Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Heroes doesn’t borrow the story of the Japanese game, it doesn’t even have a story. However, I can’t finger a reason why three characters that were seen in the anime were cut from the game.
Naruto: Narultimate Portable also included scaled down versions of the mini games from Naruto: Ultimate Ninja 2. You could take part in tree running, Shikamaru’s shadow training and a quiz given out by Iruka. Once again, it’s understandable if Namco Bandai cut the quiz game since it was text heavy and many of the questions were related to things unseen in the US timeline. But why cut the other mini games? Was it to make room for the wireless mode?
Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Heroes has game sharing, a feature that few PSP games take advantage of. You can engage in a match, on a single stage with only one copy of the game. However, loading the game and transferring the data is painful. So painful that I don’t think many people are going to be utilizing this after trying it out as a novelty. To make matters worse, you have to reload data after each fight. The result is you’re loading the wireless fights more than actually playing them.
I think my view of this game is tainted because the US version feels crippled compared to Naruto: Narultimate Portable. When I had the Japanese game I was pleased that I could take a replica of the Naruto: Ultimate Ninja series on the road, even if the story mode was tedious. But it’s hard not to compare Naruto’s two PSP outlets side by side when one clearly has more content than the other.
