NARUTO SHIPPUDEN: Ultimate Ninja STORM 4

Where it sits in history

Lay every dimension side by side and Storm 4's place is clear: it is the finale of the Shippuden mainline, and at launch it was the definitive game-ified version of the entire anime's ending. It has sold 11.88 million copies, the sales champion of the Storm series and one of the best-selling fighting games ever made — a result that on its own proves it caught a huge crowd who wanted to throw the last punch of this story themselves. Later entries still run on its staging framework, proof of the template's staying power; it defined what a Naruto game is supposed to look like. Connections, the 2023 follow-up, leans on the same playbook of cel-shaded duels and frame-perfect set-pieces, which tells you how little anyone has found to improve on the formula this game locked in.

Who should buy it is just as direct: Naruto veterans who finished all of Shippuden, want to play out that Final Valley close with their own hands, and want to collect the full roster to see everyone's ultimate. For them, the shortfalls flagged above — a short story, Adventure Mode filler, weak AI and shaky online — are mostly buried under the satisfaction of "I finally got to fight this ending myself." The emotional payoff it hands over is something other games cannot give, and it is the most valuable thing about it beyond the price tag. If you are that person, you already know it, and no list of technical shortfalls is going to talk you out of the one thing you came for.

Who should skip it, and which version to grab

Flip it around and the no-buy is just as worth stating. If what you want is a deep, rigorously balanced hardcore fighter to live in online for the long haul, this will let you down. Its feel leans performance over competition, its netcode is shaky, and its balance was never built to hold a serious versus scene. Hold it to the wrong expectation and you both lose — you blame it for not being hardcore, and it genuinely never tried to be.

On versions the call is simple: go straight for the "Storm 4 plus Road to Boruto" bundle, the authoritative package for replaying all of Shippuden and then stepping into the Boruto era. The standalone costume, Sound Four and Momoshiki/Kinshiki packs are optional collector fare, no impact on the core, take them or leave them. Which loops back to the hardest-to-copy point: against same-era Dragon Ball Xenoverse, Xenoverse sustains itself on character creation and gear grinding, while this game runs on the density of restaging the source's climaxes frame by frame — that "press a button and the scene you cried at replays" spectacle still has no real imitator years on. That is why, all this time later, it remains worth booting up just for it: it is not the best fighting game, but it may be the best love letter ever written to Naruto. Its mid-seven overall sits fairly — honest about the short campaign, padded modes and rough online, without burying the series-ceiling spectacle, art and roster it actually nailed.