Naruto Shippuden: Shinobi Rumble (DS) Review - PAGE 1

Just when I thought Naruto fans had enough games to slog through, Naruto Shippuden: Shinobi Rumble jumps onto the scene with even more mediocrity than a bowl of Cheerios. As with the majority of Naruto games, I must point out that this game is for the fans only. If you're not a fan of the show, don't even bother reading the back of the box.

After booting up the cartridge, I jumped right into story mode. Here you'll find 21 chapters of vagueness complemented by fighting -- that is if you can push the A button fast enough to get past the mind numbing dialogue. If your thumb doesn't give out on you, you will eventually end up in a battle.

Each chapter revolves around its own battle. In the beginning it's considered "training" because you're using the good characters to move through the tutorials. When you are going through the enemy's side of the story though, they just seem to get pissed at each other all the time and end up in bitch fights.

The music is the same garbage looped over and over and over again. If you're lucky it won't put you to sleep. I suggest turning the volume down and putting on your iPod. If nothing else you can put on some Metallica or Pantera to give you a fighting chance to stay awake.

The arenas are just as bland as everything else in the game. With the same four or five duplicated, you quickly get a sense of 'been there, done that'. The worst part is the same arenas are also used in the other modes, so you will not get a break from the boring scenery.

The story mode took me an hour and a half. Nearly an hour of that was spent reading through dialog, one or two lines at a time. A lot of the dialog had references I either didn't fully understand or were one line jokes that reeked of immaturity.

After waking up from the nightmare that is the story mode, I went onto "Special Missions" with a handful of characters. I must admit I felt a little bit guilty because I slightly enjoyed this mode...for about ten minutes. Players have three missions to choose from that will reward you with a number of stamps. 

During these missions you must satisfy the requirements in order to receive the stamps. The higher the stamp reward, the more difficult the missions are. The missions range from surviving for a set amount of time to defeating enemies while your health depletes. Once you have completed the mission, you are rewarded the stamps which go onto a BINGO card.

As you can imagine, you receive special rewards when you fill up a line on the BINGO card. With these you can customize your favorite character. The real challenge in the "Special Mission" mode though is the ability to play through all 16 characters and fill up their BINGO cards before you get permanent brain damage.

You can also go to "Personal Battles" mode, which allows you to choose a character and push through nine normal battles and one with a question mark. Why does the final battle have a question mark? Is the tenth battle supposed to be a surprise? That's like giving someone a birthday present with see through wrapping paper. SURPRISE!

The only real upside to this game is you can battle up to four players using the local wireless function. Of course you have to find three other people who felt the desire to torture themselves and picked up their own copy. Unfortunately I do not know of any such poor souls, and could only punish myself with the single player experience.

The sprites and the animations are OK, but are nothing to write home about. Enemies are clunky when they move, and I found my characters to be very slow when trying to dish out major combos. Sometimes I would be in the middle of whooping up on an enemy, only to go right through him, then he would turn around and sucker punch me.

The moves pretty much stick to basic brawler controls. You have light attack, heavy attack, special attack, and block. You can also jump in the air, and use teleportation to quickly move you across the screen or out of a bad situation. Just be careful not to get too mashy with the buttons as your character can not face a different direction midway and you end up wasting a lot of effort punching air.

Overall this game is flat out bad. I'm not sure why fans keep putting up with this type of mediocre fan service, as I'm certain they deserve better. Even worse, I feel shamed to even see the Atlus name attached to this game. From a longtime fan's point of view, it seems the merger of Atlus into Index hasn't boded well for their quality and will have lasting effects on their once untarnished reputation as a supplier of high quality games.