[Wretchedness]

Fans of Manga are a loyal bunch. I'm a One Piece fan myself and I'd defend Dr Tony Tony Chopper to the death. Although being a reindeer with superpowers he probably doesn't need much help from me. Anyway, I digress. What I'm trying to say is fans of Naruto may as well stop reading and go play this game, you guys will love it no matter what I say.

For everyone else what we have here is a 3D fighting game based on the Naruto Manga series by Masashi Kishimoto that first appeared in Japanese magazine Shonen Jump back in 1997. The game is called generations as it lets players do battle with characters from different Naruto story arcs. This leaves us with plenty of fighters to get to grips with including different versions of the same characters.

If I'm honest, I don't really have that much to say about this game. That's not a bad thing, it's just that with a game like this you pretty much know what you will be getting, mostly the same as you get with other fighting games, the usual single player modes as well as 2 player face off's and online.



Starting with the single player story is a wise choice, not only can you familiarize yourself with the controls, you can also take in the nicely animated cut scenes. It's at this point of the review that I'm glad I made fans of the series stop reading as I really can't tell you how the story holds up to the series. All I know is that to me as a newbie to the series, I enjoyed watching and taking in the story in between the constant brawling. I mentioned this to my advisor of all things Animé and thankfully, he agreed that fans will be appeased with the story on offer here. Next time I must do more research.

The game itself does play well. As I said its a 3D fighter that lets you run around a quite sizeable circular arena whilst trying to kick your opponents teeth in. This is a fairly straight forward 1 on 1 fighter, however, you are able to take a couple of support characters into battle with you. A quick button press will bring a support character into play to help you for a short amount of time. This helps bring a little bit of strategy to fights as you try to use these at the appropriate time to aid your fight. You can use them individually or at the same time, but after they disappear you will have to wait for their bars to fill back up before being able to use them again.

Limited abilities such as these are a welcome addition to any fighting game. Not only do you have the support characters but you also have various limited use items mapped to the D-Pad, such as a sneaky projectile to lob at your foe should he choose to run away. Although the most helpful limited use ability would have to be the decoy button. Should you find yourself being destroyed by your opponent simply bash the decoy button and a log will appear where you once stood taking a barrage of punches and you will appear behind your enemy in the hope of getting a few sneaky punches in yourself. Obviously your opponent could do the same if they are able but at least you can interrupt the pummelling, no matter how briefly. Your bread and butter fight buttons are all the front buttons, these complete the simple, yet pretty deep, control scheme.



New players will easily be able to get through large portions of the game by simply mashing the buttons like crazy, feeling fairly good yet not really improving the skills needed to succeed. Take your new found button bashing online and you may as well just commit seppuku, you will be destroyed comprehensively unless you are paired up with another button bashing noob.

Maybe just leave online alone until you have honed your skills sufficiently. This is a game that really wants you to improve. There's the usual practice mode that allows you to spend hours and hours learning all the moves and button combos that some people absolutely love, I'm looking at you Street fighter Players. Obviously this comes in handy. What's more handy however, is the ability to watch other fighters saved replays. You can look up the best fighters and see what sort of strategy they employ, learn from them and try and come up with some tactics of your own. Not a new feature, but one I like.



Despite saying I had little to say about this game I have waffled on a fair bit and have skipped over a few bits. Most of you will already know if this a game for you, if you're on the fence I'd say give it a try. Its a fun fighting game that should last a fair amount of time. There are plenty of characters to unlock as well as things to collect, that aid you along the way. My favourite being a set of collectable cards which I haven’t really mentioned here but go play for yourselves. See you on the servers.

7.8