NARUTO: Ultimate Ninja STORM

Somewhere between a highlight reel and a fever dream, NARUTO: Ultimate Ninja STORM is a game that remembers how it felt to be twelve and invincible.

You don’t play it so much as fall into it, into the whoosh of a Rasengan, the flash of a Sharingan, the endlessly looping run cycles through Hidden Leaf Village. This is less a fighter, more a playable tribute to the energy of mid-2000s anime: loud, bright, overdramatic, and occasionally brilliant. It’s also deeply uneven. But that’s kind of the point.

Mechanically, STORM is a game of flourishes over fundamentals. Combos are single-button. Ultimate Jutsu are basically cutscenes. But beneath the ease lies a rhythm, spacing, timing, chakra management, and if you squint, there’s almost a dance to it. Like a genin pulling off a perfect substitution, it’s not always clear how it works, but it does. Most of the time.

Free Battle mode is where the game breathes, 25 characters, crisp 3D movement, and an AI that’s just annoying enough to keep you honest. Here, Naruto STORM becomes the game it was meant to be: messy, fast, kinetic fun. It doesn’t teach you how to play it, it just expects you to feel it.

The story mode, though? More like detention. A charming idea (roam Konoha! relive the arcs!) dragged down by repetitive side quests, XP bottlenecks, and an inexplicably quiet retelling of one of anime’s loudest shows. Like reading Naruto’s journal with the volume turned off.

But STORM doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to move, and it does, with the awkward grace of a ninja-in-training, half-stumbling, half-soaring, all heart.