Naruto: Ultimate Ninja (Series)

Naruto: Ultimate Ninja, known in Japan as the Naruto: Narutimate Series (Japanese:  ナルティメットシリーズ, Hepburn: Naruto: Narutimetto Shirīzu), is a series of fighting video games, based on the popular manga and anime series Naruto by Masashi Kishimoto, for the PlayStation 2.

Gameplay
The series is a 1 on 1 2D-plane-based free-movement fighting game akin to the likes of Super Smash Bros., with stage hazards and bottomless pits one can fall off of. A unique aesthetic to this game is the battle intros and victory screens are rendered in koma/panels akin to a manga. Another unique aesthetic is that when each time when a round starts after the koma/panel-styled intro, the two opposing characters recoil from each other along the ground leaping back a set distance from each other with the back-leaping function.

It also features a unique battle system with special attacks and various techniques that can be used. Uniquely-named attacks are performed though these methods (all of these are performed with the Circle button by default):

Overall

 * 1) Extremely fun gameplay similar to that of the Super Smash Bros series.
 * 2) They are extremely faithful to the manga and anime.
 * 3) Tight and responsive controls.
 * 4) Excellent story modes in all of the games. The stories follow the episodes extremely well.
 * 5) Tons of playable characters in each game. Some of them even include characters that were never playable in a Naruto game before, such as Doto Kazahana from the movie.
 * 6) Awesome soundtrack. Some of the songs are even from the anime series.
 * 7) Excellent voice acting in both English and Japanese.
 * 8) Unlike many other Naruto games, all of the games were translated into English and Japanese.
 * 9) Starting with the second game, you can freely explore Konoha and the surrounding areas.
 * 10) Some of the games even have exclusive story modes that were never seen in the anime series.
 * 11) Each game is packed full of content.
 * 12) Excellent replay value.
 * 13) Multiplayer is extremely fun.
 * 14) Decent graphics.

Ultimate Ninja

 * 1) Each character has their own unique story.

Ultimate Ninja 2

 * 1) The Ultimate Jutsus are really cool, and you can choose between doing one of three of them at any given time, plus if you're good enough you can extend them further with quicktime events.
 * 2) The story mode contains four story arcs. The first two follows the anime and manga, those being the Invasion of Orochimaru Arc and the Tsunade Retrieval Arc respectively, and then there were two arcs that they created specifically for the game.
 * 3) The arcs they created for the game were decent.
 * 4) A good size roster of characters. There was a total of 32 characters in the game, (33 in the Japanese version, which was a special promotion for the movie Naruto: Ninja Clash in the Land of Snow).
 * 5) Incredibly fun and addicting gameplay.
 * 6) You can have up to two other characters as support characters who can assist you occasionally.
 * 7) * In versus mode you can increase the amount of support characters each character has. To do this, choose a character and fight against another character, and win three times in a row. If you do this, those two characters will become support characters of each other.
 * 8) An incredible amount of unlockables that you can buy form the Tanzaku Market if you build up your Ryo. These include, but are (probably) not limited to, Figures, Ninja Info Cards, FMV's, Voices, Music, etc.
 * 9) There's also an incredible amount of side missions within the main game.
 * 10) The game finds away to continuously challenge the player, at least in the side missions, even if they have gotten really good at the game, by coming up with unique challenge conditions for fights, such as using substitution jutsu a certain mount of times, rebounding a certain amount of times, finishing the battle with a certain Ultimate Jutsu, finishing the battle with a certain normal Jutsu, rebounding your ninja tools with your opponents a certain amount of times, finishing the battle in a more strict time limit, fighting in a state of slow speed, fighting in a weightless state, never stopping attacking for more than one count, or finishing the battle without taking a single hit, among many others. In fact, some of the toughest missions will put many of those restraints on you, only for the most skilled of players.

Ultimate Ninja 3

 * 1) Super cool Jutsus.
 * 2) Powerful attacks.
 * 3) Great plot.
 * 4) Excellent music.
 * 5) Sound effects are just great.
 * 6) It has UNT Naruto & Second State Sasuke.
 * 7) Excellent FMVs.
 * 8) Wonderful cel-shaded graphics.
 * 9) Great voice acting from the cast of Naruto.
 * 10) You play as Naruto in Master Road mode.
 * 11) There is a decent amount of depth in the gameplay.
 * 12) * Early matches are based around chakra management and escaping combos, which can drain your meter fast.
 * 13) * You can do tons of combos with both melee and jutsu, used with abilities present in the series.
 * 14) * Jutsu canceling opens up to some great combos.
 * 15) The Ultimate Jutsu are just cool. They were in the previous game but expanded upon in this one.
 * 16) You have the ability to use other character's normal jutsu (not their Ultimate Jutsus) when you play as them in the versus mode.

Ultimate Ninja 4

 * 1) Super cool Jutsus.
 * 2) Powerful attacks.
 * 3) Great plot that follows the first Shippuden arc.
 * 4) Excellent music.
 * 5) Sound effects are awesome.
 * 6) Excellent FMVs.
 * 7) Wonderful cel-shaded graphics.
 * 8) Great voice acting from the cast of Naruto.
 * 9) The Ultimate Jutsu are just cool. They were in the previous games but expanded upon in this one.
 * 10) Not only can you play as the Shippuden characters, you can also play as the younger Naruto characters.

Ultimate Ninja 5

 * 1) A really great story that covers the first 2 Shippuden arcs.
 * 2) Includes over 50 characters. It includes the Shippuden versions of the Konoha 12, 4 of the Akatsuki members and even the characters from part 1, like Zabuza, Haku and the Sound Four
 * 3) Extremely fun fighting system comparable to the Super Smash Bros series.
 * 4) The controls are extremely tight and responsive.
 * 5) Some characters can even do jutsu they haven’t done in the manga and anime series, like Zabuza doing Rasengan and Kiba doing Primary Lotus.
 * 6) The world of Konoha is huge. You could spend hours exploring it and discovering new secrets.
 * 7) Extremely good graphics for a PS2 game.
 * 8) While this game didn’t release in North America, the game has been released in Europe, so there is a English translation of the game.
 * 9) You can recreate almost every major fight from the manga and anime series in this game, due to the huge amount of characters and stages.
 * 10) Each character plays rather uniquely and has their own special attacks.
 * 11) The soundtrack is amazing and feels like it came straight out of the anime.
 * 12) The cutscenes look beautiful and resemble movie cutscenes.
 * 13) Excellent replay value.
 * 14) Tons of content.

Ultimate Ninja

 * 1) The game has the least amount of content compared to the rest of the games
 * 2) Fighting is also the worst.
 * 3) No proper story mode.
 * 4) Very little characters

Ultimate Ninja 2

 * 1) While the FMV cutscenes look decent, the in-game graphics are really bad, even for their time.
 * 2) While the Tanzaku Market is a cool feature, it can become tedious to grind Ryo until you have enough to buy everything.
 * 3) The slot machines in Tanzaku Town. While it's kind of humorous, and even fun at first, considering that it's obviously a joke on the fact that Tsunade, the Fifth Hokage, often sneaks away to Tanzaku Town to gamble, and they are the quickest way to grind Ryo, they get boring after awhile.
 * 4) The pushups mini-game with Rock Lee is one of the most annoying side quests in all of video games.
 * 5) The substitution Jutsu is incredibly hard and frustrating to pull off, and half of the time it doens't work at all no matter how much you jam on the substitution button, (R2).
 * 6) One of the Secret Scrolls you have to earn in the side game is earning 9,999,999 Ryo. This in and of itself is already tedious, but what makes it worse is the fact that if you have to have that amount all at once; if you spend any money, then it's subtracted not just from your wallet, but from your ultimate goal.

Ultimate Ninja 3

 * 1) While the FMV graphics are pretty great, the in-game graphics aren't too good, it consists of a lot of muddy textures and incomplete character models, (incomplete meaning alot of times their faces, or other parts of their bodies, aren't always there).
 * 2) While the story that follows the anime and manga is really good, the story that they created for the game isn't too interesting.
 * 3) It can be really hard and frustrating to pull off a substitution jutsu because your timing on the button has to be absolutely perfect and even then sometimes it doesn't work.

Ultimate Ninja 4

 * 1) The game ends during the middle of the Rescue Gaara arc. You don't even get to rescue him.
 * 2) Shippuden Sasuke isn't a playable character.
 * 3) The game feels a bit rushed.

Ultimate Ninja 5

 * 1) This game sadly never came out in North America, meaning you had to import if you wanted to play this game.
 * 2) Like most fighting games, some characters are overpowered and underpowered.
 * 3) The intro of this game is scary.

Reception
Various Ultimate Ninja games have become Namco Bandai's best-selling games with Ultimate Ninja Storm 2 being its second best-selling game from 2010 behind Tekken 6 with 1.1 million units sold. In January 2012, Namco Bandai announced that they have sold 10 million Naruto games worldwide, including 1.9 million units in Asia, 4.3 million in North America, and 3.8 million in Europe. In celebration CyberConnect2's CEO Hiroshi Matsuyama participated in the 2012 Paris International Marathon while cosplaying as Naruto Uzumaki, thanking fans. By 2016, more than 15 million units were sold. As of 2019, 20 million units have sold. In 2017, the mobile game Ultimate Ninja Blazing grossed ¥10.5 billion ($96 million) in China.

Critical reception to the games has been positive. G4's X-Play gave Ultimate Ninja a three out of five for a creative comicbook feel and stylish cel-shaded graphics, but complained that the controls are too simple, and that the English voices are "slightly questionable." Both IGN and GameSpot noted the game was both accessible and enjoyable and praised the anime/manga-inspired graphics. Titles for the PlayStation Portable received considerably lower averages in gaming sites. Ultimate Ninja Storm was also the only video game to win the Excellent Prize in the Entertainment Division of the 13th annual Japan Media Arts Festival.