Recent reviews by SpaceRancher

I'm a long-time Naruto fan, and when I heard rumblings of this game back when, I was slightly excited, to have the opportunity to create my own ninja, and share a world with my favorite characters, doing missions with my friends and things of the sort. After I've learned what the game was and what it included, my excitement waned until it vanished completely. So after waiting for this game to go on sale and playing through most of what the game has to offer, these are my thoughts.

If you're hoping for an epic Naruto story that revolves around your development as a ninja, don't. This game has no real coherent story, as you're introduced into the game and made your character, you'll be greeted with a boring dialogue that introduces you to the world and it's facilities where you'll do your missions, PVE, PVP, customization and all that. After that small introduction you're on your own. While the gameplay itself is fun, the missions are repetitive and get boring eventually, being redeemed only when you do them with friends. The missions offer no real story and just serve as a platform for you to level up, get scrolls (that net you customization items, like loot crates), and advance your master level which gives you all sorts of rewards.

Now, in the customization part, I was very disappointed, with the lack of optional clothes and original content, what's the point of making my own ninja if 85% of the customization items are based on the original characters, like don't get me wrong, it's cool to look like them, I just wish there were more options for individuality, and this goes for hair-types, Jutsus (which is alright, I guess) and "make-up". In addition, something that really annoyed me is the recoloring of outfits, and by recoloring I don't mean you get to pick from a palette of colors or a slide system, oh no, they have made original palettes with color combinations that they chose, and let me tell you, I'm not exaggerating when I'm saying that the choices they give are some of the worst color combination I have ever seen, ugly can't even begin to describe them, so most of the time, you'll find yourself sticking to the original palettes as they look the best. Not only that, they added *some* differentiation to the costumes, adding ugly-ass patterns to already existing outfits, there's really nothing to look for when obtaining these items from scrolls and you're better off just earning cash to buy what you want straight up from the store.

Now I know, there's season two yet to come, but I don't really see them adding anything original apart from more "masters" and a couple of missions, another lazy thing is, at first I had the idea that you would've picked your village at the beginning of the game and start there as you go through the villages for different missions. Nope, you get one boring and small map of Konoha, I can't even call it a map, it's pretty much a tiny lobby, where you can't jump on top of buildings, can't interact with almost anything, it's just bland and boring. The animations for walking around in the lobby are horrible, like the adventure mode in Bandai's Naruto games, and I guess it shouldn't surprise me that they've essentially ripped them from the games, while the game itself is graphically inferior to those games in every aspect.

Overall, this game is disappointing, and as someone who hates live-service games, I guess I should've known, but my love for Naruto got the better of me this time, with the anime and manga ending, and Boruto being sub-par, who knows when and if we'll get decent games in the future.

-sigh- 4/10 because you CAN find a cool look (it's hard), and there's a lot of Jutsus to choose from, and the game-play itself isn't that bad.

♥♥♥♥ this game. I clocked 127 hours into it so far, and while it's a considerable amount, I could not have done it without the aid of mods, this community saved this half-assed rpg for me, and while it could be a fun 'quirky haha fallout' game to new or casual fallout fans, this game, in my experience, felt like a thousand steps down in RPG elements, dark humor, overall feeling and lore of the series. It feels as though Bethesda itself doesn't know the franchise and made this game with shallow fake geek culture in mind, highlighting Dogmeat, cheesy dialog, and Nuka Cola, which are cool but not the essence of the series, Fallout became a name brand, plastered on this casual shooter that holds nothing of substance but has all the 'awesome' and 'random' refrences casual gamers remember. Seriously Todd, while I don't put all the blame on one person, if you held any kind of truth when you said you loved games and wanted to make them highlighting things such as 'player's choice and freedom' when you did that Making of Oblivion documentary, there's no way you would of let this game slide the way it is.

Oh, and also paid mods.