The Naruto franchise has spawned dozens of video games, but picking the best one isn’t easy. We can help.
The Naruto franchise is over 20 years old, with games spanning four generations of consoles and three generations of handhelds. Many of these games would have been lost to time anyway. The combination of licensing purgatory, closing of digital storefronts, and lagging backwards compatibility features has left many games on Nintendo and Sony platforms in limbo.
However, there are still many useful games to check out on modern consoles. There are also plenty of games from the past for resourceful fans to track down. These are the best Naruto games from past and present.
Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm Legacy is the best value among the games
Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 4 is the best Naruto game of all time according to review aggregators. The problem is that the title has a very narrow focus on the final stage of the Naruto Shippuden story. Fans who want to take in the entire Naruto story can check out Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm Legacy for the full story.
Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm Legacy includes the remastered versions of the first three Ultimate Ninja Storm titles from Ultimate Ninja Storm Trilogy, as well as Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 4: Road to Boruto. This hits all the major story beats from both Naruto and Naruto Shippuden, in addition to Boruto’s first big story.
Each of the major titles of the Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm series is available separately on current generation consoles. Legacy bundles them both physically and digitally at a discount.
Naruto: The Broken Bond and Rise of a Ninja are among the best games, but have been forgotten
We weren’t kidding when we said that there are tons of Naruto games out there and a lot of them have been lost through time.
Ubisoft Montreal has developed a few Naruto titles. While it’s unusual for a non-Japanese studio to publish a series of Naruto games, the real kicker is that this series is an Xbox 360 exclusive. The series is very similar to the Ultimate Ninja series that launched around the same time as mixing single player RPG elements in a fighting game. Unlike Ultimate Ninja, the gameplay is more like traditional fighting games.
Naruto: The Broken Bond shares the highest median average score with Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 4. It hasn’t aged gracefully, but is still playable more than 15 years after its initial release. Unfortunately, the games are not currently supported by Xbox One or Xbox Series backwards compatibility.
Naruto: Clash of Ninja Revolution 3 is a strong fighting game
Most Naruto games have juggled genres or split them into minigames with varying degrees of success. Tomy’s Naruto: Clash of Ninja series didn’t.
The Clash of Ninja titles on Gamecube and Clash of Ninja Revolution 3 are different. These are generally solid fighting games that are easy for anyone to learn. While not on a par with established fighting games like Street Fighter or Guilty Gear, purely from a gameplay and replayability point of view, these titles are very strong and have introduced some original characters that are interesting and fresh.
Unfortunately, like the Xbox 360 exclusive titles, these titles have been forgotten. The only way to play these games today is to track down a physical copy. All of these games can be played on the Nintendo Wii, but players can dust off their Wii U to try out the Clash of Ninja Revolution series.
All Naruto handheld titles are equal for the worst games
The biggest proof of the age of the Naruto series at this point is that multiple games were released on the old Game Boy Advance. Unfortunately, none of those games are particularly good.
The Naruto Ninja Council series ran across the GBA and Nintendo DS and was generally awful. While the GBA originals were usable at the time, the games were put to shame by other handheld platformers at the time, including New Super Mario Bros, Kirby Mass Attack, and even Sonic Rush.
In addition to these games were the Naruto: Path of the Ninja series. These were standard JRPGs released worldwide on the DS and exclusively in Japan on GBA. The games are of varying quality, but ultimately lagged well behind other JRPGs on both platforms. While they aren’t necessarily bad games, they are far less engaging than the Final Fantasy remasters, Dragon Quest games, both Golden Sun games, and many others. Like Naruto filler episodes, they aren’t terrible, but they aren’t mandatory for everyone except those most desperate for more Naruto content.
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