Ultimate Ninja Heroes Shippuden Fight

The meat of the game Ultimate Ninja Heroes Shippuden Fight is in a mode called the Master Road, which picks up with Narutimate returning to Hidden Leaf Village after an absence of two-and-a-half years.

He barely has time to fight a few sparring matches before his friend Gaara is kidnapped by the evil Akatsuki organization.

The story of the subsequent rescue attempt and what follows is spread out across the seven chapters that make up the Master Road.

This will all be familiar territory for Naru fans, but the story is told so incoherently and throws so many characters and clan names at you that players unacquainted with the source material will be lost.

The occasional dramatic animation sequence livens things up, but the overwhelming majority of conversations take place between static character portraits that oddly stand side by side and stare out at you even while speaking to each other.

The Master Road is presented as a series of squares along which you move cute little animated.

As you progress from mission to mission, you frequently unlock new characters you can use in both the Master Road and other modes.

You also unlock new jutsu attacks and tactics that you can activate to enhance attributes like attack power and speed.

You're regularly given the chance to use points earned for completing missions to purchase movies, music, and character artwork as well.

If the thought of acquiring all these goodies isn't enough to motivate you, you're out of luck because the gameplay itself is wholly unrewarding.

Missions take on one of two formats.

In some, the camera is situated close to your character, and you must defeat one or two opponents just as you would in a fighting game.

In others, the camera is further away, giving the action the look of a side-scrolling platformer.

In some missions, you must defeat a certain number of enemies to advance; other times, your goal is to reach the end within a certain time limit.

No matter what format a mission takes or what goals you're assigned, the shallow Ultimate Ninja Heroes Shippuden Fight action and poor controls ensure that they're all equally uninvolving.