You can choose between Story Mode, Battle Mode and Wireless Battle. The storyline isn't more than a background for the actual fights and without knowing the series it will be hard to follow. Not that it's so interesting though, as things remain quite on the surface. The Battle Mode is divided into Player VS. CPU and Single Player. The first lets you choose who fights who and where, while the latter just has you perform a series of fights with a character you've chosen. Wireless Battle allows you to fight again friends through the multi-card play system. Finishing the storyline, or a series of single player events, unlocks some more characters. In total that means there's another ten that await you, next to the original ten.

In the end it all comes down to the same thing: a fight in two rounds with additional one if you have a stalemate after the first two. The possible combos are quite limited, the game mostly runs on special and secret techniques. These are different depending on character and give more damage to the opponent. Especially the "secret technique" is annihilating (more than half the health bar of your enemy goes down the drain) but it can fail and you need a full Chakra bar. Chakra which is also necessary for teleportation which you can even use while being under attack (except of course when your adversary takes you on with his own secret technique). Chakra can be gained by hitting your enemies without getting hit yourself. All this may sound quite varied but in the end it does come down to ordinary button smashing.

As an extra you can use certain power-ups during combat. In total there are 15 different ones from which 6 are chosen per player on a random basis before the battle starts. Examples are additional defense, blocking opponent chakra, heighten health and/or chakra, and so on. Changes in status (for instance extra attack) however don't last long enough to be really effective and can only be used in the middle of a fight so having a thumbring is certainly not a luxury.

Naruto, friends and foes fight their way in 3D. Unfortunately the characters look quite lifeless and that feeling only gets enhanced when after a fight the camera zooms in on the winner who does his or her victory dance. The zoom only focuses attention on the fact that there's little dancing to be seen and that the graphics are really terrible.