Naruto: Path of the Ninja review

You will spend most of your time in the missions engaged in a vanilla turn-based battle system that will neither confuse nor excite anyone who has played an RPG before. Occasional stylus commands, which may or may not impact the amount of damage done by Jutsus (special attacks), help to alleviate random-encounter fatigue.

Path of the Ninja distils the first 80 episodes of the Naruto TV series into a funny, well-told, and occasionally crowded story. The game never wanders far from the show, from its episodic mission structure to the great, short anime cutscenes that play on the DS’s top screen during important moments and battles. Unfortunately, the repetitive plain graphics cannot do the story justice. Neither can the four or five songs that make up the soundtrack, which makes you feel like you’re in the underwear department of JCPenny. The question then is, why play an abridgement of a great story when you can watch the whole thing?