I've been reading through Naruto for the first time lately and figured I'd try the games. I'm way past this one in the story, but I wanted to start at the beginning to see how the games evolved.

In terms of making use of the franchise it's a pretty good game. Lots of aesthetic, using things like ninja missions as a mode, and the stages themselves are FULL of little nods to the series.

The gameplay is unfortunately way too janky. I do like that it's the kinda game where learning one character means you'll at least be competent with the others, but still different enough to feel excited about using new characters. But overall the game feels like it can't decide if it wants to be more like a traditional fighter, or a smash clone. Items are EVERYWHERE in the stages - you'll have one assist character who will show up every 5 seconds to give you an item, along with breakable objects that give items. I like the idea of the assist character, especially as they each have a specific assist move they can give out, but they need to appear way less frequently.

The stages do this thing of having 2 layers, which is an okay idea in theory, but in practice it just leads to you and your opponent constantly trying to chase each other through layers like 2 people trying to side step each other in a corridor.

It's an okay start for the franchise I guess. Not unplayable, but the fights just feel very "too many cooks in the pot" with all the ideas they had going on.

Also it's kinda funny how they try to make a story mode for each character despite the fact only like 3 of the characters in the game had enough fights to justify the 6-fight-long stories in the game. You'll get some characters whose canon opponents aren't even in the game, like Shikamaru's opponents, so 90% of the story mode is just making up reasons for 2 characters to fight. It's basically just arcade mode disguised as a story.