NARUTO SHIPPUDEN: Ultimate Ninja STORM 4

I came into this one skeptical. Arena fighters with anime licenses tend to be wide as an ocean and deep as a puddle, and my first hour with Storm 4 did nothing to shake that assumption. One attack button, a Chakra bar for ninjutsu, substitution jutsu to warp out of incoming hits, and a three-character team you can swap mid-fight. That leader-swap mechanic is the one genuine tactical layer here: assembling a team of three from a roster of over 100 characters and timing your swaps correctly actually rewards thought, even if the core combo strings stay simple enough for anyone to button-press their way to a win. The fighting system is accessible almost to a fault. Basic strikes plus a held analog direction for variants, ninjutsu mapped to one button, Awakening mode to go super-saiyan for a limited window when things get desperate. Wall-running returns from the original Storm, and seeing two characters tear up the side of an arena while trading jutsu looks genuinely stunning. The presentation is the game's single strongest card: cutscenes push the visual fidelity of the Shippuden arc harder than most animated productions, and the final Naruto-versus-Sasuke sequence is the kind of thing that earns a replay. Where it falls short is depth. Most characters share enough of the same input logic that once you have one down, you have sixty percent of the roster down. A few fan-favourite fighters carry movesets that have barely changed since earlier entries in the series, and that gets noticed fast by anyone who has spent time with the previous games. The story mode covers the Fourth Great Ninja War through to the series finale, running roughly 20 hours if you push through the main path. If you have not watched Shippuden up to that arc, the plot will be incomprehensible. If you have, the ride is worth it. Adventure mode adds a looser open-world section with fetch quests and collectible Memory Fragments that let you revisit old battles, and it is more engaging than the genre average, though nothing that will challenge anyone raised on proper RPGs. Tournament and League options fill out the offline side, and with a controller in hand and a friend on the couch this game is a good Saturday afternoon. Online is the part I have to be straight about. The netcode runs peer-to-peer, no rollback, and match quality is heavily dependent on both connections behaving. Matchmaking has been slow and inconsistent since launch, and post-launch the player pool at higher skill levels has thinned enough that climbing ranked is mostly a question of who you can get matched with rather than a clean competitive ladder. Lag spikes in online bouts can desync the hit registration, which is painful in a game where a single substitution jutsu at the wrong moment decides the round. If your play group is on PC and you are planning to use Steam's invite system to run matches with known opponents, the P2P setup actually works reasonably well for low-latency connections. Expecting a healthy ranked queue in 2025 is a stretch. The bottom line for someone asking whether to buy it: Storm 4 is the series at its visual and content peak, with the deepest roster, the best story presentation, and the leader-swap mechanic adding something new over its predecessors. It is not a serious competitive fighter. It does not pretend to be. If you are a Naruto fan who wants to watch the arc play out in the best-looking version possible, and bang out local versus matches between story chapters, this is the definitive way to do it on PC. If your primary goal is a ranked online grind with snappy netcode and a balanced matchup chart, look elsewhere.

Fred · Scout Team

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