So, continuing in my trend of buying Xbox 360 games just because they're cheap or on-sale, I decided to pick up Naruto while it was still $38. Someone said it was like Assassin's Creed in another thread, so I figured it couldn't be too bad. And after staying up until 2am this morning playing it, I would appear that I was right because it is pretty awesome.
The cel-shaded graphics are amazing, I love the way the game looks, it's so clean and sharp. The fighting engine is pretty simple but still satisfying. It suffers from a lot of the same problems as Assassin's Creed in that the quests are fairly repetitive and you end of doing a lot of backtracking and lots of collecting, but the optional quests do add a bit of variety. I think the one thing that I really like about it is that it's a very relaxing game. Maybe I'm just a weaksauce gamer that gets easily frustrated (in fact, I'm pretty sure that I am) but I like the fact that I'm not worried about dying at all in this game, or alerting the guards to my presence like in AC. You can die, but the memoclips make it pretty difficult to do, and even the timed sections are short and easily replayable. Evening the collectathon parts are less frustrating than in AC because I'm not worried about whether rooftop guards are watching me while I'm trying to find coins. It's just a very relaxing game, and I like that from time to time.
So far I'm about 5 hours in, I've got about half of the copper coins, a 1/5th of the gold coins, about 2/3rds of the lovelorn citizens, and I've done a couple of races/hide-and-seeks/ramen deliveries. In the main story quest, I've just reached the second part of the Forest of Death Exam. My prior experience with Naruto is slightly more than zero (I saw the first episode fansubbed many years ago), but the story seems to be handled pretty well for newcomers. It's a little choppy, but I can make sense of it. My only complaint is that it would have been nicer if they'd done some all-new cutscenes. It kind of pulls you out of the game when you go from some awesome 1080p cel-shaded graphics, to some nasty-looking, poorly compressed 4:3 TV animation for the cutscenes that look like they were culled from YouTube.
