Naruto: Ninja Destiny
Nintendo DS
PG
Tomy


'Naruto' is, as I understand it, a 'big thing' with the kids at the moment. It's what 'Yu-Gi-Oh' was a few years back, what 'DragonballZ' was a few years before that, and if you're reading this magazine there's a good chance you don't really care much about the franchise. There's been an emerging trend in games based around 'fad' animes of being surprisingly good, however - the PS2 and XBox 360 Naruto games went down pretty well with gamers and critics alike, while every year I find myself struggling not to buy impossibly fun looking DragonballZ games for the Wii. Fortunately though, there's no need to run down to JB Hi Fi and gingerly hand over $70 to the quirky-but-cute looking girl behind the counter, as 'Naruto: Ninja Destiny' is definitely nothing special.

Game mechanics couldn't be simpler. You've got your basic strong attack, weak attack, block and jump buttons, which all operate as you'd expect in a fighting game. The game's main attempts at differentiation comes from the teleportation ability, touch screen use and the supercharged 'Chakra' attacks - all good ideas, but none of them are implemented as well as they should be. Basically hitting your enemy enough times fills up your Chakra bar, allowing you to teleport behind your enemy for a quarter of the bar (which is actually a pretty cool mechanic, although it's pretty easy to abuse) or use your special attack if your bar is full. Filling the bar is very easy, and these Chakra attacks, depending on the character, range from 'overpowered' to 'insanely overpowered'. It's like 'Guilty Gear's one-hit-kill moves, only nowhere near as well thought-out or implemented. The touch screen gives you six different 'items' to use during battle, ranging from health and chakra increases through to higher attack or defense, which simply makes what is already a very easy game practically impossible to lose.

The game contains a 'story' mode, which condenses 100 episodes or so into a few incomprehensible lines of text between battles and takes about half an hour to finish, as well as a battle mode, which is just more of the same. Most of the characters play more or less the same and combos are pretty uninteresting, resulting in a game that consists of a few minutes of lukewarm gameplay that repeats itself over and over again. Plus, it's going to embarrass me when I take it down to EB to trade towards GTA IV. Avoid it.

James O'Connor