Along with the slightly different, RPG direction that Naruto: Path of the Ninja takes, the game also goes in a slightly different manner as far as graphics are concerned (well, different for Naruto games anyway. The top-down, isometric style of the game really helps to sell the fact that this isn't your typical Naruto title, and it helps to get you into the RPG mindset that much quicker. While not in a fight, the world and the characters roaming around in it are fairly large so that even some of the secondary characters like Tenten or Ino are easily recognizable. But if you are in the middle of the Hidden Leaf Village, you will see a lot of duplicated character models, like a kid or an old woman.

When in a fight, the sprites used for the characters are larger so you have a lot more detail in both the character models and the little patch of environment the fight is taking place on. The view also switches from a top-down perspective to more of a 45 degree angle to give the game a more classic-arcade feel.

There isn't a whole lot to audio in this game. There are some voiceovers, but it isn't really frequent and the music, while energetic sounding, didn't really add to the overall impact of the game a whole lot.

Naruto: Path of the Ninja is an RPG that takes you through the first few missions of Squad Seven. You will control Naruto, Sasuke, Sakura and Kakashi as they take on Haku and Zabuza in the Land of Waves, prepare for the Chunin Exams and go through the destruction of the Hidden Leaf Village all the way to the Third Hokage's funeral.

The game takes place in two modes, while in and while out of fights. If you are out of a fight, you will run around the world talking to and interacting with various people, buying, selling or picking up objects and coming under attack with random encounters. For the most part, this is a pretty straightforward mode and by no means should it throw anyone for any loops. There are a few RPG elements here that modify how your party members react to each other in battle, but the only real interesting aspects of this game come in the encounters.

When you get into a fight, your characters appear on the right side of the screen and your opponents are on the left. Each half is divided into an invisible three by four grid that your characters are allowed to move around in (you can't go onto your opponents' side and vice versa). Your position on the board with respect to the opponent you are attacking changes how effective your various attacks are. For instance, if you are directly in front of the enemy, you deal more damage and if you just moved forward before starting that attack, you do even more damage (I guess it's like you are rushing towards your enemy). If you position characters into specific formations, those characters also gain various benefits and those benefits can be increased by the chemistry between the two characters, which is handled outside of fights and discussed in the Game Mechanics section of this review.

During battles, you can not only perform generic attacks and use items or weapons, but you can also execute Jutsus that your characters have learned in the game. Jutsus are activated in two ways, you either have to press a series of face buttons or trace a symbol with your finger or stylus on the touch screen. As fans of the show would expect, some Jutsus modify the character's abilities (like Naruto's Shadow Clone splits him into three), attack several opponents at once (Sasuke's Phoenix Flower Jutsu) or deal a whole lot of damage to an individual character (Kakashi's Chidori).

Path of the Ninja is actually a DS version of the original Japanese GBA game called Naruto RPG: Uketsugareshi Hi no Ishi with a few DS-styled control changes. I have to say I didn't know that for sure until I started writing this review and wanted to research this matter, but I suspected it. The game just feels like a GBA title (much like those early DS games), and I think a lot of that is the minimal use of the touch-screen and having the top screen be little more than a way to show your characters' various stats.

Naruto: Path of the Ninja starts off with fairly easy battles and while you will face stronger opponents as the game progresses, as long as you've been leveling up your characters at a fairly steady pace, you won't really have any problems getting past even the bigger boss battles. I found some of the tougher fights here against Zabuza.

But it wasn't the fighting that made the game difficult. The hardest part about this game was finding out exactly what I needed to do next. Well, that isn't completely true. The game does a good job explaining things to you right when you start the next phase of your mission; the problem comes if you have to put the game down for any length of time. I found myself wandering around aimlessly for the first five minutes or so each time I got back into the game because there was no kind of reminder as to what I needed to do next, or what I was in the middle of. This made aspects of the game much harder because I was all prepared to get into more fights, but instead I would have to spend a lot of time getting reacquainted with where I was in the story just to move on and I typically got somewhat frustrated when I knew I had to put the game down again.

Naruto: Path of the Ninja has one interesting RPG aspect that really caught my eye and that is Chemistry. This is how well the various members of your team like each other and, ultimately, how well they fight together. There are several ways to improve the Chemistry between your team members. One of the main ways is, during conversations, you will have dialogue choices. You can choose whatever you want and the overall path of the dialogue won't change. For instance, when Kakashi is talking to the three Genin about what they want, at one point, Naruto can either dog Sasuke or talk about Ramen. If you rag on Sasuke, Naruto will begin to speak, see how angry Sakura is getting and change his mind and mention Ramen. The only consequence to that choice is that Sakura will like you less and the chemistry between the two characters will go down. There are many ways to improve the Chemistry between characters. One of the ones I liked was the ability to buy another character dinner. If the two dine together, their Chemistry improves.

There were a few parts of Path of Ninja that I didn't like, or at least felt it didn't rise to its full potential, but overall, I really enjoyed the game and feel like any Naruto fan will find this game's portrayal of the first 80 episodes to be fairly true and much more in-depth than most other Naruto games.