I must say, I had very little idea what this game was when it arrived on my doorstep. Regardless of this insignificant detail, I brought it home to my housemates with an air of genuine, though not overpowering, curiosity. It has the word 'ninja' in the title, so it must be good in some way I thought to myself. I mean, look at Tenchu. It wasn't long before I realised I shouldn't look at Tenchu for comparison, because this is nothing like Tenchu. In fact, Naruto Ultimate Ninja is as much like Tenchu as mutant tigers are like chocolate sprinkles.

Apparently, this franchise is based on a Manga-esque cartoon show, massively popular in Japan and gaining momentum over here. I'm going to admit ignorance now rather than get found out later - I'd never heard of it and am still very much in the dark. What I have figured out is that Naruto, the dude on the front cover wearing orange, is the main character. That's about it. It should make for a good review though because at least I'm going to be objective.

So, I return home late one evening and laden with this gift of unknown origin I tell them I have a game about ninjas but I don't know what it is or what it's about. On that note we begin to play. The first thing we notice is that it is completely ridiculous in style. Like many zany Japanese concepts it has three dozen varieties of spiky haircut, lots of bold colours and a man that says OH! a lot. At every available opportunity, be it between fights or when you select a stage or a fighter or whenever, he's in there shouting OH! It's not an 'oh' like you would say if it you accidentally walked in on a hot girl getting naked, but that special kind of 'up at the end' OH! that you might say if you were kicked in the nuts, hard. There's also a frog that jumps up and down as the game loads. It has a cape.

So, what is this game that I've rattled on about but not yet described or explained? Well it's a game of conflict, a fighting game if you will, in the same vein as the beloved Street Fighter. The only problem with that statement is that this is to Street Fighter what Lambourghinis are to family saloon cars. Naruto Ninja is all angles, vents and spoilers, with a thundering V12 sticking way too far out the back end. Okay, so the metaphor got a little out of control there, but this game is so wacky that it's difficult to describe it in normal human language. My friends and I start playing, and after being told what to do by a spiky haired guy with a bandage over his eye, who really sounds like he can't be bothered to breathe, we choose to have a vs battle and we select a character from the six available (with eight more unlockable). After doing this, the two characters trade words about how the other is pathetic and how their particular form of jitsu is more powerful and how their even showing up is an exercise in folly, as they have no chance whatsoever of winning this fight, hmm! Then you pick a stage. There are many to choose from.

You may notice I'm glossing over a few points here but that's simply to get to the bit where we start fighting because you simply have to hear about this. The fight begins and you immediately notice the distinct visual style of the game. It's cel-shaded, very bold and colourful and there seems to be a lot happening on the screen at any given time. There are different levels to the fighting arena, but it's a two dimensional platform, with another 'deeper' level further into the screen and you can jump freely between the two by hitting up/down and X. Battle commences and we furiously start hitting buttons (none of us have checked out what the controls are). Things start happening, we don't really know what. Blades start flying out of our characters, punches and kicks are thrown, characters change colour, leaves fly across the screen and the screen itself comes alive with animations here, there and everywhere. Faces appear spouting ancient wisdom, sub characters jump onto the screen and then off again, there's fire and swooping things and the occasional oversized Japanese symbol, all of which, though seemingly chaotic, actually compliments the fighting and gives the action a real sense of pace and all out mania. Imagine a comic book in high speed motion. Even the health gauges are animated to give the screen more sense of life and activity.

The controls seem to be fairly straightforward; circle attacks with punches and kicks, square throws projectiles such as knives, house bricks or shuriken, X jumps and triangle operates some kind of anger mode. Anger mode (as I have affectionately dubbed it in a non-accurate, non-scientific kind of way) makes your character turn red and angry. Whilst red, a combined strike of triangle and square activates a sort of mini game, where the regular action stops and a series of pre-rendered animations begin. In this phase, the screen shows a series of pre-animated attacks being unleashed and humorous actions being carried out, such as someone reading a book or walking a dog. Look, I didn't make this game, I'm just telling you about it. To successfully attack your opponent in this mode you must, when prompted, hit the correct buttons in sequence. X, square, square, triangle -quick! If you pull this off, some outrageously over the top fighting combinations are unleashed, all interspersed with witty comments about how powerful the unleasher is and ending with the victim losing lots of his or her health.

This whole game must sound too weird to be true, and in a lot of ways it is. It may be even harder to believe but my buddies and I had an absolute riot playing it. We had no idea what was happening and felt like we had no real control over events as they unfolded, but damn were we enjoying watching the silly little characters beat each other up! We were less concerned about hitting the right button at the right time as we were about the things happening on screen and trying to fathom out what on Bob's green Earth was actually happening. This game is visually stunning - you cannot take that away from it. There's so much going on that it cannot fail to hold your attention completely. The background seems alive with characters offering you health and extra chi (which you must use to perform the outrageous power attacks) and taking photographs with cameras, or generally doing things I'm sure you're not meant to understand. The foreground is even more alive with symbols and effects that accentuate the action of the fight, and there are so many mini animations of attacks and level shifts happening that it seems to be in fast forward, but it all looks great. You revert to a childlike state as you play Naruto, giggling and chirping to yourself with glee.

The noises that surround you as all this happens are as surreal, if not more so, than the visuals. There's a veritable symphony of random noises, including sub-characters shouting about how they're going to get you, the whooshing of flying knives, the yipping of small creatures, the smashing of inanimate objects, the thudding of bodies hitting the ground and the general smorgasbord of vocabulary that spews forth from each character as they bounce around the screen. The music is a mix of tinny 8-bit techno, traditional Japanese pan-pipes and something like a cow being squeezed and drowned at the same time. It's good, but too much of it will turn your brain into jelly and you will start acting like Brad Pitt in Twelve Monkeys.

The only problem is, it only lasts for about five minutes and then you start to notice that there's an awful lot of repetition. You've seen that last move five times already and you're only thirty seconds into the fight. The move list is extremely limited and although there are a thousand things happening on the screen at once, it all starts to seem like an extravagant ruse to distract you from the fact that the same thing is happening on repeat. Each character has a set number of attacks and although you can create different combinations by combining attack buttons with a direction, again it seems like it's out of your hands and you're simply a bystander needed to keep hammering the buttons so the fighters can keep attacking each other over and over again. The feeling of not being in control doesn't get any better as the fight progresses; you simply hammer down any button that's close, hoping that at any minute your character is going to do something cool or useful, but it always seems like the other guy is doing something cooler. This isn't a case of effort against reward, it's a case of shouting about how cool the move you just pulled off was and then frantically trying to figure out just what the hell it was you did.

As the battle draws to an end, you take stock of yourself, breathe, and try to understand what it was that just happened. You never will. This game is so fast paced that it's burning the candle from both ends - and from strategic points all along the shaft - the result of which is a candle that melts really, really quickly.

There's a number of modes for you to compete in, although nothing really original is in there. You have a standard arcade mode where you can jump straight into the action or fight against a friend in two player mode. There's a scenario mode where you play out the story of your chosen character, though the story is the usual blend of avenging dead fathers, the proving of one's might to impress a girl, or just being bored on a Saturday and looking for something to do. The story unfolds by fighting opponents in a set order and trying to piece the snippets of surreal character dialogue together in an attempt to create some kind of narrative that makes sense. Finally there's a challenge mode, where you have to compete at different difficulty levels against such handicaps as time and lack of health. Completing challenges unlocks the usual variety of extras, including production stills, sound bytes and pictures of the developers making funny faces - you know the type. Fans will no doubt revel in the content available, though personally I think life's a bit too short for that kind of thing.

Naruto Ultimate Ninja is a very amusing game - the only problem is that the amusement doesn't last for a very long time at all. Visually there's nothing groundbreaking about the style of animation or the quality of the graphics, it's more about the way that it is animated and presented, like some ungodly union of Yu-Gi-Oh!, Final Fantasy and Dragon Ball Z. The pace is furious, made more furious by the many mini-animations that surround the fight and the ridiculous sound effects and theme tunes that accompany the battles. The very essence of this game is just ridiculous. I think I've used the word ridiculous more in this review than any that I've written before, or will surely write afterward. It's just such a shame that after half an hour of loving it and thinking it's the best thing since sliced jam, I could hardly stand to carry on. I think it broke my mind.

Reviewed by Jim Powell for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).