Grab your custom jutsu hand seals and prepare to feel a crushing sense of inadequacy when comparing your reaction time to a ninja’s because we’re diving shadow clone deep into the first Naruto Ultimate Ninja game on PlayStation 2! This week we’re channeling our inner shinobi to explore how Bandai Namco took Masashi Kishimoto’s legendary manga about a determined orange-suited underdog and transformed it into a frantic button-mashing tournament fighter that somehow convinced an entire generation of fans that they could recreate iconic Naruto moments if they just hit the attack button fast enough and screamed at their TV harder than Naruto himself.
Released during the golden age of anime-to-console adaptations, the Naruto Ultimate Ninja games became the de facto way fans could live out their ninja fantasies—assuming your ninja fantasy involves janky camera angles, occasionally unresponsive inputs, and the kind of special effect visual soup that makes you wonder if you’re actually watching a jutsu or if your PS2 is just having a mild aneurysm. With fighters pulled straight from the Hidden Leaf Village and beyond, these games proved that sometimes the best way to honor a beloved manga is to give players the chance to make Naruto fight characters he had absolutely no reason to fight (looking at you, random filler villains).
This episode, we’re absolutely stoked to welcome Cory Byrd from Byrds Eye View Comics—a fellow enthusiast of all things sequential art and gaming who can probably explain why Naruto’s popularity transcended manga, anime, AND video games with the kind of clarity that makes marketing departments weep with envy. Together, we’ll investigate whether these games managed to capture the heart, humor, and hyperkinetic energy of Kishimoto’s creation, or if they just left us face-first in the dirt like Naruto at the beginning of the series.
So synchronize your chakra, practice your most devastating combo, and prepare for an episode that’s guaranteed to be more chaotic than a Sand Village invasion and infinitely more entertaining than watching filler arcs about onigiri eating contests.
Learn such things as:
- Can a game truly capture the experience of having ninjas solve political problems through friendship when there’s no friendship stat on the screen?
- How many ninja village headbands would it take to actually run an economy, or is that question unanswerable because the series never bothered explaining it?
- Is it more important for characters in a fighter to be balanced or accurate?
- And so much more!
You can find Cory on Instagram @ByrdsEyeOfficial, the Byrds Eye View Comics Facebook page, and of course his website Byrds Eyes View Comics.
If you want to be a guest on the show please check out the Be a A Guest on the Show page and let me know what you’re interested in.
If you want to help support the show check out the Play Comics Patreon page or head over to the Support page if you want to go another route. You can also check out the Play Comics Merch Store.
Play Comics is part of the Gonna Geek Network, which is a wonderful collection of geeky podcasts. Be sure to check out the other shows on Gonna Geek if you need more of a nerd fix.
You can find Play Comics @playcomics.bsky.social on Bluesky, @playcomicspodcast on Threads, @playcomics on YouTube or the Play Comics website.
A big thanks to Gender Pop and the Glitterjaw Queer Podcast Collective for the promos today.
Intro/Outro Music by Backing Track, who did something really cool but nobody saw it. You know, because of the whole being a ninja thing.
Support Play Comics by contributing to their tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/j
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