The popular Naruto series has everything you need to make a great game; fantastically unrealistic ’anime physics’ can lend themselves to exciting fights, and the diverse cast of ninjas also gives you lots of ideas to work with. What Dragon Blade Chronicles on the Wii does is take that setting and use part of its story in a third person brawler, one letting you play both titular hero Naruto as well as Sasuke as they fight through hordes of enemies, explore large stages, and fight a variety of bosses. It should have been a great game, and it almost is... except several technical problems drag it down.
Most of your play is split between two activities; fighting and exploring across large 3D stages, or watching the plot unfold through detailed, often fully voiced cutscenes. While Dragon Blade Chronicles is primarily a brawler with platforming elements mixed in, it definitely doesn’t skimp on the story and series fans will probably find much to like here. The fighting is basic but not completely devoid of detail; you have your typical "press Attack a lot to do a combo" techniques and multi-jumps, but can also collect scrolls with special moves on them. These are easy done; assign them to a button on the d-pad and simply press that direction to release blasts of fire, create mud-wall platforms to jump on, fling shuriken, and more.
While much of that has been seen before in other games, it is competently done. Even boss fights have good variety to them, with foes ranging from enormous dragons to an enemy flying through the air while you can only jump from platform to platform in pursuit; fighting from the ground is impossible since it’s covered in landmines. These are all really good parts of the game, and if it had been refined a little more Dragon Blade Chronicles would be fun even for those not familiar with the Naruto series. So what went wrong?
Technical flaws are the main issue here. The worst of these is the camera; it probably sounds cliche to complain about that in a review by now, but it genuinely is a problem in Dragon Blade Chronicles. It works fine when you’re moving forward in a level, but most of them require backtracking and even when you’re heading back it stays firmly looking ’ahead’, so it’s almost impossible to tell where you’re going and you could easily fall off some platforms to an instant death in this way. Almost as bad is the game’s regular drops in framerate; certain environments and combinations of enemies cause Dragon Blade Chronicles to begin running at what seems to be half or even one-third regular speed. It’s not done for dramatic emphasis... it happens even against basic enemies and in places where you’re expected to act as quickly as possible.
These two problems really weigh Dragon Blade Chronicles down. It has most of the elements of a good game, but a bad camera and regular framerate drops make it hard to play. Even the addition of a versus mode for you and a friend to go head-to-head doesn’t do much to make up for this, and that’s really too bad. The game could have been anywhere from genuinely good to outright amazing, but when it’s so difficult to do even basic things much of the charm is lost. If you’re not already a fan of Naruto, this game won’t do anything for you. And if you do like the series then perhaps you would be better served by the other Naruto Shippuden game released around the same time as this one: Naruto vs. Sasuke for the Nintendo DS, while it’s in a wholly different genre (2D platformer), it’s much better.
