While I watched a bit of Naruto back in the day, Shippuden is almost totally uncharted territory for me. I know a couple of things, so playing a game that is an abridged version of an anime based on a manga may not be the world's greatest idea.

At the very least, I liked this game more than the first one. It's still a fighting game, so it primarily sticks to that. Overworld movement does feel a bit slow, though, and it seems like most of the side content is locked behind finishing the main story. Speaking of the main story, it was alright. Again, an abridged version of the anime, so context for some things is either compressed heavily or outright removed. The deaths of certain characters is also very heavily telegraphed, but that may just be me having seen these kinds of cases enough that I can read death flags.

One big change compared to the first game is that your health doesn't restore between fights, requiring you to use items to heal...outside of the points they either change your playable character or after certain cutscenes, so sometimes I wonder why even bother with the non restoring health? Collecting materials to get ninja tools was alright, and the tools themselves, mainly the ones that boost your strength and defense got more useful in the lategame when enemies get more trigger happy with the substitution jutsu and feel more tanky in general.

I'd say the game was alright. This does show the insane power scaling and how much further it's going to fly off the handle in the near future, though.