Anime games are a delicate thing. The majority of them fall somewhere between god-awful wastes of cash and just-okay. Either way, it's pretty irrelevant, as fans of many a TV series still continue to buy them, good or awful, and we know that people are always curious about them. We're happy to say that based on our first hands-on demo with Naruto: Rise of a Ninja during the last twenty minutes of E3, we're officially converted. Personally, I loathe Naruto the series, but I was very easily won over by my time with the game thanks, in part, to the buzz surrounding it from the least likely people, and its fluid blending of sandbox gameplay with other game genres.
Rise of a Ninja will put you in the shoes of Naruto Uzemaki, a young ninja in training. The game's storyline will span the first eighty episodes of the long-running TV show. We talked to one of the leads of licensing, who reassured us that in his dealings with Shonen Jump, the team has done a bang-up job of keeping things authentic. How authentic? The map of Konoha that you'll have in the game is identical to all of the reference info that is kept for the show. That means that the buildings and monuments that you've seen in eighty episodes of the TV show are the same buildings that you'll zip by while you're on a ramen delivery mission, which should delight the most ardently hardcore fans.
As we mentioned before, the thing that has impressed us most about Rise isn't necessarily its wonderful-looking visuals or its fidelity to the license; it's the way that the game manages to seamlessly combine open-ended gameplay with other genres, such as platforming and fighting. It's safe to say that while GTA: San Andreas introduced lots of sub-games and mini-games into the sandbox genre, it'll be tough to find a game that flows so easily from one to another.
Case in point: a platforming stage outside of Konoha. Kakashi Hatake has given Naruto the task of quickly crossing over waterlogged bridges to get outside of the village. You'll be on a timer, and as far as we can tell at this point, the action looks a lot like some sort of race you'd see in the likes of Sly Cooper. Eventually, after enough bridges go down, you'll have to rely on your chakra powers, which is a mini-game in and of itself. You'll concentrate chakras to your feet, run across the water, and use the left and right triggers to maintain balance as you walk on H2O.
Our centerpiece of the demo, however, was a first hands-on with Rise's built-in fighting game. All at once spastic, yet smooth, people might not mistake it for Virtua Fighter 5, but it's certainly quite competent for a brawler. You'll have two thousand-point grids near your icon. One is orange, and measures your health. The second is blue, and measures your chakra energy, which can be recharged over time. X and Y are your attack buttons, A jumps, and B is for blocking. Right Trigger is for grabs, and Left Trigger, very importantly, opens up the menu for special attacks.
