Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja 5 (2007)

Based on the NARUTO SHIPPUDEN anime, NARUTO Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja 5 takes the player on a heart-pounding adventure from the point of Narutos return to Konoha to end of the second Sasuke Rescue Arc. Our hero will find himself once again taking on an ever more devious and powerful succession of enemies, relying on his faithful friends and incredible ninja skills to win the day.

This particularly is the best naruto game on the PS2. The graphics, gameplay, music, story are excellent, the combos are hard. this game has two ways to play, the 2D style in the story and in 3D also in the story but in the 2 player combat, RPG mode is a free-roaming 3d game and reverts to the standard 2d fights when you talk to certain NPCs or as part of the story. Unfortunately, there are also 3d fights which have been oversimplified to the point where all you do is mash on circle and occasionally throw in an rasengan. There are way too many random battles in story mode also. You have to run all over the game to progress the story, and on every non-city map there are random goons who will attack if you get too close. You can momentarily disable these goons by throwing shurikens at them before they touch you, but it takes a lot of shurikens, and that's a lot of work to have to do multiple times every map. As you get further in story mode the goons get a lot more annoying, meaning there are a lot more of them everywhere and they have more health so it takes more shurikens to bypass. Fun fact: I couldn't use Naruto's first Ultimate jutsu. In a part of the cutscene the game crashed and didn't work. When I was forced to finish with the ultimate, I lost life to use the second ultimate. This worked until a specific secondary mission arrived, where I was forced to use the first ultimate. I couldn't pass for months until I had the brilliant idea: turn my Playstation upside down. It worked, since then I've only played that game with the PlayStation upside down lol.

The fighting game combat has one new addition: assist characters. Pick a character and then an assist one and you can call them out at almost any time to attack the opponent. Each character has a unique assist attack, plus certain character pairings will give unique ultimate or regular jutsu or assist attacks. They’re stupid in the sense that you can call them out while getting hit or blocking, but you can already substitute jutsu out of most situations so it’s fine. After you do like, all the sidequests post-beating the game, talking with Tsunade leads to a new arc!! It’s filler but it’s neat, you get to play as Sasuke going through a big hidden dungeon in Orochimaru’s hideout. The dungeon is kinda boring but the RPG combat with Sasuke is honestly way better than with Naruto, insane how they put this much effort into him for what is a post-game dungeon most players won’t get to probably, Anyways, after finishing it, you have to do it again but with Naruto and gang, and it’s way less fun. And yeah, Naruto, Sakura and Sai have wall breaking and switch-hitting abilities which didn’t matter until now. Ah yes, the opening is the best ever (compared to the previous games), it's not even close, it's actually pretty good.

this is one of the games I have the most hours too. I'm proud to have done 100%. It took a lot of work and I had a lot of fun. I'm very proud to beat this game not 1 more than 2 times. Your fighting style is incredible, I spend up to 4 hours playing with my friends and I consider myself very good at this game. I learned all possible attacks. The fights with my friend are very epic, I'm not the biggest fighting game fan, but this one had me too hooked.