This is a pretty rough game. As someone who grew up with Naruto and enjoyed some of the old games, I did enjoy reliving parts of the story and playing as the characters, but this game just has so many issues that it's hard to recommend.

First, the game has this concept of blocking off story missions by XP that you can only gain by doing side quests. However most of these side quests boil down to either a fight (which is fine), or one of two very boring missions where you just kind of run through trees or on a tree. I ended up hacking my mission XP to 999 so I could avoid these and it made my experience a lot better but someone trying to play through this naturally will be faced with this which kinda sucks imo.

Second, I was not a fan of how this game did the story. You basically just play some fights with 0 context aside from a quick blurb at the beginning and I just feel like it takes any narrative and emotion out of the whole thing, leaving you kind of confused about what's going on unless you understand the story well. That being said the final mission was done really well and the few times there were cutscenes they were always enjoyable.

Lastly, on PC this game has a bug where when running at 60 FPS (the default btw) it makes everything run at 1/2 speed so it feels super slow and clunky. I did not know this at the beginning and ended up playing half the game like this and honestly hated the entire thing. Once I fixed it the fighting was a lot snappier and quick and fun. I know this isn't necessarily a problem of the game as a whole but still hurt my experience a lot.

Also the fights themselves are very easy. Played at insane difficulty and rarely had any problems aside from dodging being hard. I know this is lowkey for kids though so I guess I don't mind.

Overall this is a very flawed game that I think only true fans of the series will enjoy putting themselves through. The fighting gameplay is fun though and there's enough character variation to make this something I could see people playing for a long time (though the other games exist so you shouldn't do that lol)