TGS 2006: Naruto -- 3D Fighting Preview
Alongside the Wii teaser trailer for Naruto at Tomy's booth was a Nintendo DS "Coming Soon" trailer showing off a new fighting game due out for the portable system. The game is obviously extremely early (the video kept cutting away to staged mock-ups of the game with drawn-in characters to show what the game might look like, then switching back to work-in-progress gameplay footage), but with few traditional fighting games on the portable, it caught our eye even at this early stage.
The Nintendo DS Naruto 3D fighting game looked very much like a DS version of Tekken, complete with juggle moves and an 'endless' battle floor that rotates and scrolls with the view as the fighters battle in 3 dimensions. The visual style of the game was surprisingly realistic, using more traditional shading techniques than the cel-shading seen in console Naruto games. 3D character rendering skewed surprisingly more towards realism than any other Naruto game we've seen before, with more true-to-human character proportions versus the light SD techniques used most often to bring mangas and anime to games -- fighters looked more like people than they did cartoon heroes. (It could be that this was just an aspect of the low completion level of the game so far ... we're not sure which way we want the final game to go since the look was kind of cool and distinctive, very much like Tekken in so many ways.) A number of summon-type or special attacks are also available in gameplay, with the bottom screen made up of six huge "buttons" to use special attacks. Despite its more realistic rendering in this video, some very identifiable Naruto effects were displayed, including that cool chalk outline effect Sakura Haruno has in the Cube games when she rages up.
Look for something more on this game when it's ready for demonstration in playable form some time in 2007.
Via IGN
