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Released a little over a year ago in Japan, Clash of Ninja 3 shifts the original Clash of Ninja’s focus to Naruto’s sequel series, Naruto Shippuden, but retains the overall look and feel of the previous games. As usual, Tomy has done a great job with the cel-shaded graphics, and the presentation is clean and appropriate to the style of the series. Being a fighting game, much of the focus is on the online and versus modes, so the story is relatively short, primarily serving as an excuse to unlock more characters.

The story roughly traces the Rescue Gaara arc that comprises Naruto Shippuden’s first 35 episodes. Being a relatively popular arc with the fandom, this is not the first time that this arc has been depicted in a Naruto video game, and it will likely not be the last. However, Clash of Ninja does a reasonable job of distilling the events of the story down to a series of battles featuring a wide variety of familiar characters.

Where it suffers is in the battle conditions, which tend to be fairly simple and repetitive. Victory is almost always a matter of beating a foe with a special attack, which can be frustratingly tricky at times. The attack meter charges quickly, but your foe’s health needs to be low enough that they go down when the strike is unleashed. Otherwise they are apt to recover and pound you into paste. Further complicating matters are the occasionally imbalanced 2-on-1 battles, which can lead to some serious frustration.

However, the story only lasts around 17 fights, and is more an afterthought than anything else. It’s there to diversify the content beyond the obligatory versus modes while giving fans a familiar vehicle by which to unlock new characters. In other words, it’s mostly just a nice bit of comfort food.