Wait! Some French studio made a Naruto game!? It's not foreign for western studios to tackle Japanese IP but this one feels especially weird. There's something off about the character designs and the crude UI and at times it feels like they probably didn't even watch the anime. A majority of the story is just told through anime cutscenes that have almost nothing to do with what you were doing gameplay-wise. It's weird! But is it bad? Not at all.

Exploring the hidden leaf feels odd at first, but once you start to unlock more of the traversal abilities it becomes really fun to run, slide, and jump around. Side missions are a joke however with the ridiculous amount of backtracking that's required when jumping between the small handful of locations.

The fights are fine, but not deep enough to get into. It all adds up to an oddly distorted retelling of the first half of the Naruto anime. As a child, I always wanted to play this and was jealous of it being an Xbox 360 exclusive, and now as an adult, who has finally played it. It's okay, especially for a 2007 next-gen Naruto game! If you like racing trials with some solid mobility it's pretty good actually.

Hopefully, the broken bond improves on the elements that were lacking in Rise of a Ninja.