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Naruto Shippuden: Dragon Blade Chronicles is a video game. It’s a game with voice actors. What’s more, it’s based on characters and their alignments in the Naruto manga. What else can I say about the game? It’s a game that took five hours to beat, which is probably a good thing, I would say.

See, in reality, Naruto Shippuden: Dragon Blade Chronicles would probably be considered a beat-em-up. I’d hold it in the same vein as Final Fight or Streets of Rage, in just about every way. There are six or seven types of enemies, and that’s it. The two alternating playable characters, Naruto and Sasuke, travel from nondescript room to nondescript room and fight waves and waves of enemies.

Each room literally has waves of these enemies, which all look like clay, and have no impressive or distinguishing characteristics. Most of the enemies only share one build, but wield a couple different weapons: a spear, an axe, some swords, or a bow. There’s one over-sized enemy that’s less common, and the last type of enemy looks a bit like a clay candy bean, but flies around shooting fireballs. Oddly, though, unless in a room that closes itself after Naruto or Sasuke enter it, these enemies are entirely optional, even despite the idea that rooms will spawn about three to five waves of them each time a character enters them. Before completing the first main area of the game, these enemies are already tired annoyances that get in the way.

The boss fights, in general, are the most interesting and well-crafted elements in the game. With elemental dragons, three Akatsuki members, and the main villain, these fights provide some varied battle experiences. Still, early bosses can be defeated through the manipulation of a simple pattern. The last handful of bosses, though, just border on sheer annoyance. These villains suddenly deal a much higher magnitude of damage and trap Naruto in devastating, frustrating combos, largely unlike that of any enemy before them. If it weren’t for all the bosses in the game, Naruto Shippuden: Dragon Blade Chronicles would likely be an entirely worthless title, but even after the first few battles, most of these bosses are a bit repetitive in concepts and execution. When they're not, they're downright cheap in attack tactics.

Similar to the boss fights with Akatsuki members, two players can duke it out using either Naruto or Sasuke in a pretty lame attempt at a Versus mode, with each character able to pick up special attacks around the field for one-time use. Handicaps are possible to set at the beginning of each round, but in the end, the victor isn‘t even decided by the winner of a given round, but rather by a Versus-only score algorithm.

A larger, strange mountain that houses the elemental dragons is the stage on which the game takes place, which is divided into five regions, each on one of the dragons’ elements. Each region uses mostly the same style of stage design, and the textures of all the regions are largely similar. There’s nothing impressive to see in any particular region, though in one area, most rooms are underground in dark rooms and in another, clouds obscure the player’s view, essentially re-using the same lame gimmick twice, though it wasn’t much more than a mere annoyance even the first time.

The game’s camera definitely obscures vision much, much more, since it can’t be manually adjusted, and doesn’t track the direction whichever character is being played as is facing very well if directions are ever changed. Worse, in several areas, especially those with any increased on-screen action or a large number of enemies, slowdown isn’t just common, it’s an inevitability.

Treasure chests litter the regions, though they’re out in the open and never contain anything all that interesting, as they only unlock marginally worthless special moves, additional character movement and combo abilities, and pieces of health or chakra, the Naruto universe version of MP.

What’s arguably most unfortunate is that The Dragon Blade Chronicles are filler. The events that occur have no impact on the overall Naruto plot, and the characters introduced will never be seen again. As the story itself is nothing special, and since it doesn’t tie into Naruto plot, or even allow players to play out many of the manga’s popular, epic battles, there’s little appeal for anyone in the story department. Even worse, since the entire story is filler, any plotlines regarding Sasuke and the Akatsuki members remain undeveloped. Behind the boss fights, the most enticing aspect of the game is the fully animated teaser-trailer style intro and the decent quality of voice acting contained in the game, but even then, I believe I’m grasping at straws.

Naruto Shippuden: Dragon Blade Chronicles isn’t fun. The game isn’t original, it’s repetitive, and feels awfully generic for a licensed title. Textures are low quality, stage design is unbelievably simple, and the story doesn’t matter in any context. Skip this game, it’s not worth the money and, while short, isn’t worth the time, either.