While the games have traditionally been one-on-one fighters, Ultimate Ninja Heroes 3 introduces four-player multiplayer to the mix, as well as co-op play. The game plays out on a 2D plane, though players can teleport from the foreground to the background (and back again) at their leisure. Like the other Ultimate Ninja Heroes games before it, Ultimate Ninja Heroes 3 is a very straight-forward fighting game that features famous characters from the Naruto series.
So it's no surprise that Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Heroes 3, another fighting game from the folks at CyberConnect2, is heading to Sony's portable - and I get to try it out. Even though the legendary manga and anime occupy a huge cross-section of Japanese pop culture, my exposure to the yellow-haired ninja comes mainly from all these fighting games that wind up on my desk.
It's funny that my experience with the Naruto franchise is almost completely within the realm of videogames.