Naruto: Path of the Ninja is an RPG that takes you through the first few missions of Squad Seven. You will control Naruto, Sasuke, Sakura and Kakashi as they take on Haku and Zabuza in the Land of Waves, prepare for the Chunin Exams and go through the destruction of the Hidden Leaf Village all the way to the Third Hokage's funeral.
The game takes place in two modes, while in and while out of fights. If you are out of a fight, you will run around the world talking to and interacting with various people, buying, selling or picking up objects and coming under attack with random encounters. For the most part, this is a pretty straightforward mode and by no means should it throw anyone for any loops. There are a few RPG elements here that modify how your party members react to each other in battle, but the only real interesting aspects of this game come in the encounters.
When you get into a fight, your characters appear on the right side of the screen and your opponents are on the left. Each half is divided into an invisible three by four grid that your characters are allowed to move around in (you can't go onto your opponents' side and vice versa). Your position on the board with respect to the opponent you are attacking changes how effective your various attacks are. For instance, if you are directly in front of the enemy, you deal more damage and if you just moved forward before starting that attack, you do even more damage (I guess it's like you are rushing towards your enemy). If you position characters into specific formations, those characters also gain various benefits and those benefits can be increased by the chemistry between the two characters, which is handled outside of fights and discussed in the Game Mechanics section of this review.
During battles, you can not only perform generic attacks and use items or weapons, but you can also execute Jutsus that your characters have learned in the game. Jutsus are activated in two ways, you either have to press a series of face buttons or trace a symbol with your finger or stylus on the touch screen. As fans of the show would expect, some Jutsus modify the character's abilities (like Naruto's Shadow Clone splits him into three), attack several opponents at once (Sasuke's Phoenix Flower Jutsu) or deal a whole lot of damage to an individual character (Kakashi's Chidori).
Path of the Ninja is actually a DS version of the original Japanese GBA game called Naruto RPG: Uketsugareshi Hi no Ishi with a few DS-styled control changes. I have to say I didn't know that for sure until I started writing this review and wanted to research this matter, but I suspected it. The game just feels like a GBA title (much like those early DS games), and I think a lot of that is the minimal use of the touch-screen and having the top screen be little more than a way to show your characters' various stats.
