These days, you can’t turn your head in a video game store without bumping into another Naruto game. The long-running manga/anime series came stateside a few years back, and even an awful initial dub on Cartoon Network couldn’t keep the fanboys from flocking. Animated ninjas fighting other animated ninjas? Sign me up!

Some Naruto games are great and some are awful, but for the most part nearly every game with that little Kyuubi host grinning on the cover like a fool is just mediocre. With Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm on the PS3, developer CyberConnect2 changed that trend by putting out one of the most gorgeous-looking games on the market, and a shining example of what licensed anime games should look like.

Watching Ultimate Ninja Storm in action is to see just how far gaming has come in a few short years. While we had plenty of cel shading years ago, this game looks particularly magnificent. It looks and feels like an actual episode of Naruto, and the fights that unfold on the screen are sometimes much more entertaining than their television counterparts. I dare you to at least watch the gameplay trailers for this game and not find yourself being amazed at how it looks.

Oddly enough, the biggest weakness of the visuals isn’t anything technical; it’s the underuse of cutscenes. Several times in the story mode you get treated to a very nice animated clip rather than the usually displayed animated avatar with text. Sadly these cutscenes are hard to come by, and their quality and entertainment value makes their rarity all the more obvious.

Unfortunately, the time spent developing the awe-inspiring graphics and animations may have taken away some precious time that could have been used to fine-tune the yawn-inspiring single player mode.

The story in Ultimate Ninja Storm’s single player Ultimate Mission Mode is comprised of the first 135 episodes in the Naruto series, and ends just before it enters filler territory and then Shippuden. It’s an odd cut-off point before the big Act 1 wrap-up of Naruto, the Sasuke chase. But hey, it leaves fans wanting to see more -- assuming they haven’t already seen up to the current episodes fan translated, that is. What’s even odder is the complete lack of several well-loved characters, most notably Zabuza and Haku. I understand how it may be easy to cut them out streamlining purposes since their story arc doesn’t mean much in the overall series plot, but what CyberConnect2 forgot is that despite their short time in the show, those two are two of the most popular non-mains from the series. So their omission will definitely displease a lot of fans.