Transcribing the anime in Naruto: Path of the Ninja

During some hands on time with Tomy’s Naruto: Path of a Ninja I noticed that the dialogue the characters said was nearly identical to the US anime. I spoke to the producer, Yoshinobu ‘Nobby’ Matsuo, and he confirmed what I believed to be true. The team at Tomy painstakingly put effort in to preserve the feel of the Viz Media version of the show for fans. At the beginning of the game the setting where Team 7 meets up for the first time was different, outside in the training grounds opposed to a rooftop, but the lines were the same. The only difference is you can occasionally choose what Naruto says. Otherwise you’re pretty much reading through the lines of the show. There are some original missions in Naruto: Path of the Ninja which will have to have original text, but during the main story arc has transcribed conversations. If there were gold stars for localization Tomy would get one for Naruto: Path of a Ninja.

As most of you know Naruto: Path of Ninja was originally a Game Boy Advance game, but Tomy incorporated some tweaks from the two DS games. The obvious ones were during battle sequences. Naruto: Path of Ninja is still uses traditional turn based combat where the heroes are on the right side of screen and the enemies (snakes, etc.) are on the left, but this time the enemies move around on a grid. After each turn they move around, somewhat randomly, similar to Live A Live. Attacks have range too. When you select Sasuke’s fireball jutsu it hits a small square and it might hit a group of crows if they cluster together. After you select the technique you can power it up by rubbing the touch screen.