Maybe it's my inner seven-year-old calling back from the forgotten aeon that is 1994, but I've remained highly cynical of smartphone games and their ability to be visually interesting and fun to play. Yet Bleach: Brave Souls had already proven that I could be hopelessly wrong in that regard. With that memory in mind, I booted up NARUTO SHIPPUDEN: Ultimate Ninja Blazing for the first time uncharacteristic hopeful that I would like it.

And I was hooked about five minutes in, so yay for optimism!

At its surface level, Ultimate Ninja Blazing is a simple strategy game with certain cross-genre mechanics, such as classic RPG stats, Rock/Paper/Scissors elemental weaknesses and special attacks you need to wait a few turns to use. Yet in spite of these more complicated elements, the gameplay itself is both deceptively simple and completely engaging. 

You, the player, take on the role of the Team Captain, dispatching your ninja on the battlefield as you engage with enemy units. Each ninja, friendly or otherwise, has a range of offense, and you attack by placing your ninja so that an enemy ninja falls within its range. Having multiple ninja's ranges converge on a single enemy allows them to attack as a team, and having one ninja's range encompass multiple enemies lets that one ninja attack them all. 

Standard attack ranges are circular, but each ninja has a special attack that boasts an irregular shape instead (rectangle, cross, etc.) allowing each side the chance to get the drop on the other. A lot of the fun is seeing just how fast you can annihilate the enemy squad with careful placement and crafty use of the elemental weaknesses. And since you'll spend most turns just moving this ninja or that into place, typical combat is at perpetual breakneck speed.

But the way you fight isn't quite the same as the enemy, since your own units draw from the same HP pool while each mook has their own health bar. This is a mixed advantage: good for you since forgetting to heal won't lose you your best warrior, bad for you because if one weaker ninja gets dog-piled then it's all over.

Still, even this isn't a sure-fire defeat; strategy and placement can compensate for a lack of strength. Brains over stats every time!

Another cool thing is that you get to borrow other players' Ninja. At the start of every stage, you choose from a list of ninja belonging to other players of similar Rank and they're yours to fight with until you beat the boss. Afterward, you get to send the ninja's owner a Friend Request so you can connect with them more easily next time. It's a great way to test-play other ninja you haven't tried yet, and may give you some ideas for a team dynamic in the future. 

Style-wise, the game definitely has Naruto's signature look down pat, whether it's in some of the obvious things like color choices and text, to more general ones like Kakashi's intro tutorial being an in-story evaluation test for your abilities as a Hidden Leaf Captain, to tiny things you barely notice, like the Loading Screen icon being Rock Lee's furious jump rope exercises. Heck, even the summoning system that lets you pay Ninja Pearls (the game's "gems") to summon new Ninja allies could've just been a simple cutscene. Instead, you have to charge Naruto's Rasengan by dragging your finger on the screen before he breaks down the gates separating you from your latest recruit. The number of gates he breaks also gives you a split-second clue about what you're going to get. More gates for rarer Ninja! 

All in all, the game's just fun. It's Free To Play, yet you don't have to make any In-App purchases to enjoy it. It engages, but only takes as much of your time as you're willing to give it. Daily Rewards draw you back, but the gameplay itself keeps you there for as long as you want it to. So if you're a Naruto fan and/or a strat-game lover who wants something non-demanding to jazz up your bus ride, you could do a whole lot worse than NARUTO SHIPPUDEN: Ultimate Ninja Blazing. 

The game is available on the App Store and Google Play. You can download it here!

Check out the official website! 

by Chris Turner

NARUTO artwork and elements © 2002 MASASHI KISHIMOTO/2007 SHIPPUDEN All Rights Reserved.
SHONEN JUMP, NARUTO and NARUTO SHIPPUDEN are trademarks of Shueisha, Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries. This product is manufactured, distributed and sold in North, South and Central American territories under license from VIZ Media, LLC.
Game software ©GREE, Inc. ©BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment Inc.