You have two different planes that you can fight on and the gameplay is fast, but very simplistic. Naruto: Ultimate Ninja is kind of like a 2D fighter.
You can unlock more characters as you progress and I found this to be a fun mode for the time. You start with only 6 characters and you can experience story events from their point of view. The way that this game fleshes out the story is with the scenario mode. In comparison to what we have these days, it is very lacking, but back then I was very satisfied with this. These fill in the story in-between the fights and it is decent enough. The story that Naruto: Ultimate Ninja tells the story of the early days of the Naruto show and the story mode only actually consists of a handful of fights. However, I still thought that it would be fun to take a walk down memory lane and see how this holds up. Look, I will admit right now that the later games in the series pretty much improved on every aspect of the game.
It was the start of a long-running series of games and it was a game that treated the source material with some real respect. As Naruto: Ultimate Ninja took so long to come out here in the West, I remember importing this game for the PlayStation 2 back in the day.
