A Deep Dive into Competitive NARUTO: Ultimate Ninja STORM

Happy 20th Anniversary!

In this video, I take a deep dive into the Ultimate Ninja Storm series through my current perspective as a fighting game player, because I've never seen it at an FGC tournament. I hope you enjoy!

TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Intro
07:45 Storm 1
16:22 Storm 2
26:45 Storm Generations
36:07 Halfway: Archetypes and Diversity
47:09 Storm 3
55:22 Storm Revolution
1:06:13 Storm 4
1:15:25 Discovering Competitive Storm
1:29:45 EVO
1:32:32 Final Thoughts

You should feel bad for me because I got 60 minutes into the video and then my laptop broke and half of the video died with it.

Music:
Intro | KANA-BOON - "Spiral" (Instrumental)
Intro | Naruto: Gekito Ninja Taisen - "Konoha Gate"
Storm 1 | Naruto: Gekito Ninja Taisen - "Third Training Field"
Storm 2 | Naruto: Gekito Ninja Taisen - "Tanzaku"
Storm Generations | Naruto: Gekito Ninja Taisen - "Third Training Field"
Halfway | Naruto: Gekito Ninja Taisen - "Konoha no Yoru"
Halfway | Naruto: Gekito Ninja Taisen - "Hidden Leaf Hot Spring"
Storm 3 | Naruto Gekito Ninja Taisen - "Sand Shambled Plans"
Storm Revolution | Naruto Gekito Ninja Taisen - "Battle Arena"
Storm 4 | Naruto Gekito Ninja Taisen - "Shumatsu"
Discovering Competitive Storm | Naruto: Gekito Ninja Taisen - "Hidden Leaf Hot Spring"
Discovering Competitive Storm | Naruto Gekito Ninja Taisen - "Battle Arena"
EVO | Storm 3 | Naruto Gekito Ninja Taisen - "Sand Shambled Plans"
Final Thoughts | Naruto: Gekito Ninja Taisen - "Third Training Field"

Gekito Ninja Taisen (Clash of Ninja) has a great soundtrack.

[KTP]

The section on storm 1 neglects just how strong jumping around while guarding is.
Chakra dashes are actually kind of terrible because of this. Not to mention what guard cancels can do.

[SuuBrainrot]

my takeaway from this video is that Matsuyama is hilarious what the heck is up with that guy

[Theonetruesona]

I’m happy he addressed Storm 2’s Title Screen and Vs Battle screen music. It makes you wanna learn piano immediately

[cubearts]

I think the major issue is that a lot of people have a narrow view of what a fighting game can be. The storm series isnt really about complex combos its about resource management and reflexes. Thank you for this video.

[vzm_underscore]

really love deep dives into the competitive scenes of games that deserve it, especially passed over fighters like an arena fighter. your content's great and i was excited to see a longform one like this. best of luck on your next projects!

[ds_fellgod-myhopewillneve]

I find it both hilarious and poetic how Naruto, a series infamous for mishandling or underutilizing its female characters, has three of the most broken characters in one of their best games all be female characters. Two of them actually fought each other in Part 1 of Naruto, and their names both start with a T.

#TemariSWEEP
#TayuyaSWEEP

[krazyzyko]

I competed and won tournaments of S2, gen & S3. I also helped the metagame develop when arashiboards was live. I've competed on DBFZ, won a couple of locals in strive (was ranked top 1 overall ELO rating last nov 2022) and melee, also competed on every other smash game and SC6.

The problem with S2 is that turtling via jump blocking was ridiculously safe.

So ppl relied on chip damage with c.kunai spam with double balance (mainly chiyo, sai or temari assists) and if one landed a U3 it's pretty much gg because making a comeback was almost impossible. So a lot of timeouts in high level play.

Sasori had this exlpoit were he could spam kunais while blocking making turtling even more broken. Combos were useless because they were easy to knj and most awakenings sucked and the good ones like sage naruto the trick was to time him out before his health went low enough to awaken. And chakra dashing was begging to get supered if you had a fast one like shikamaru or U3 on deck.

Gen's hyper offense was broken af air chakra dash spam had little to no counterplay, the sub bar was great but had no iframes so subbing a multi hit assist like pain would make you fall into it and still get hit.

PTS kankuro was banned because his tilt spam had no counterplay so just get guard broken, hit or sub and fall into the next tilt which had no endlag and caused strikeback into U1 (which where multi hitting bombs that you couldn't sub out successfully).

The new combo cancel mechanic was scrubby. It wasted twice as much chakra as a normal chakra dash so it was better to jump cancel your combos to loop or bait out a sub and then air chakra dash.

Temari and chiyo balance assists are also a problem in this game. But if you're tired of ppl air chakra dashing at you, use a puppet as guard assist, their is no cool down to block chakra dashes.

S3 was my favorite it wasn't too defensive nor too aggro but the IA had some characters that could camp you out the whole match and only rely on chip damage from their assists. I called them the super turtles: Minato, Guy, Konan and Lee.
To even this out I would've said to ban minato and make lighting desert (thee smallest stage) the only tournament legal stage. The other turtles can be catched and aren't as strong at not getting hit as minato was. Masked man was a problem here too at not getting hit but he got nerfed on full burst.

Rev felt like a watered down version of S3 so l stopped caring and dropped storm altogether.

I gave up on arena fighters because they're just too broken but l agree that they are competitive. The most balanced arena fighters I've watched are Pokken and Kill la Kill.

[PoisonedOkami]

I really appreciate your insight to Naruto Storm. As a competitor and content creator on the game, the series is a huge part of my life and up bringing, seeing your in depth insight is lovely to see. I also hope to see Storm in major FGC scenes.

Great video!

[yvngtempest]

Not done with the video yet, but it's nice to see someone in the FGC talk about the series. Me and my friends grinded and took the game so seriously and got really REALLY good at these games. I even played in a few tournaments at anime conventions, getting 1st in one and 2nd in the other. These games are why I have the competitive spirit that I have today and what eventually led me into the FGC proper, and the spirit that I gained from playing Storm made trying to finally get good at traditional fighters a welcomed challenge as opposed to a frustrating and demoralizing one. Storm is why I have that dog in me lmao.

[DeathAlchemist]

something about tayuya and temari being great to the point of being banned warms my heart

[GuileWinQuote]

Algorithm blessed me with this one. Fantastic video, thanks for this!

[DevTwoThousand]

Came across this on an algorithmic whim and gotta say, after playing a decent amount of 3 with friends and never picking up 4 cause it looked too similar on the surface, I'm glad to have been so dead wrong. I always love when a niche community thrives, and remains unbothered in their lane, enjoying their favorite game.
Definitely picking it up on the very next sale! :).

Great video!!

[awesomeChris]

As someone who’s being playing storm since storm 2, this video perfectly describes the evolution of this game series. Great job seriously I can’t even begin to explain the jump of evolution when we got to storm generations. I would argue that game is more competitively made than storm 4😂

[MineasTheKid]

Fantastic dive into the competitive aspects of storm! I started playing the series right when generations released so I didn't know how terrible it was with storm 1 and 2, those were really interesting to learn about (especially the infinite rng substitution stuff, wtf). Storm 3 really changed the whole series and it honestly only got more interesting from there, even with revolution being a low point. Also I really like how much love you put into exploring each aspect introduced throughout the series, especially storm 4 cause that game has a lot of things to cover. Overall, wonderful vid!

I think the competitive aspect of storm 4 is especially interesting, with the multiple nuances that come with different assists, neutral, and the several uses of those as well as other resources. Theres so many different things to learn, far more than what appears on the surface, and it only gets deeper with time. I don't imagine the FGC would ever truly accept it as a fighting game but I think its in the level of 'really fun kusoge'. As a side note, there was recently a tournament in my city that had a bunch of fighting games for entry INCLUDING storm 4 and it was super hype! Many strong players came out to play. Hopefully there are more pushes for that in bigger events.

[ScarletStarManor]

Games that give skill gaps and skill expressions in tandem is what allows one to be competitive. Seeing Naruto outside of clash and classic ultimate ninja is cool, and now I want to play.

[IITheGoodLifeII]

Fantastic video. Your points are very well articulated and presented through the lens of someone steeped in the FGC community. Again, great work. I’d love see an updated video discussing the changes that will be found in Storm Connections.

[IamSimplyYOSH]

I feel some more discussion on tilt attacks and certain ninja tools should have been talked about more and how some characters were way too strong over others, or how short hopping broke the game lol. I think as far as true competitive natures you see today in the game this is a pretty bare bones on the surface discussion of it. I loved the video though!! I hope this means we get more attention into the scene in the future. In my personal experience tilt attacks were usually niche until Storm 4, in Storm 4 some characters tilt attacks were straight up broken. For instance. Almighty Push basically deleted anything in the game, however it was a jutsu tied to one or two characters. In Storm 4 however Sasuke (The Last) could perform Almighty Push in a tilt attack for no chakra cost, albeit the move was slower so it just took proper timing. Tilt attacks could also be used after you sub and predict that your opponent will use chakra dash to punish, you could use something like Nejis tilt attack (that had super armor) to just air palm someone away from you. Another piece to competitive was short hopping. If someone wanted to spam chakra dash on your substitution you had a split second to react by jumping over their heads and doing an air chakra dash to punish. If you were really good and risky with it you could double tap jump to do the normal air dash to punish it.

Two other quick things I can think of is some characters like Deidara and Reanimated Itachi were especially busted, Deidara could essentially just throw out endless attacks and never get punished for it since some of the shuriken button attacks had priority hitting attacks that go through chakra dash and or he could use a ninjutsu to cover himself. Itachi was interesting due to the fact he had Amaterasu, this attack literally followed you everywhere on the map and would outrun double jump slide evades and you are basically forced to block it, blocking it made you lose a whole tier of block on its own. Meaning someone could easily pressure you with it to force defensive options and they could run into you while it followed you. Also if you think using a counter jutsu would work, it would not. It had priority over most jutsu in the game even things like palm rotation. It also did TONS of damage. That character was heavily spammed in ranked ladder back in the day and for good reason. (Mostly in Storm 3 iirc)
Lastly you could actually cover the screen in jutsus to hide yourself and perform surprise attacks, also certain attacks had hitstun and if you let go of your combo string mid-way and did a different combo you could actually restart the next combo. OR you could perform ninjutsu out of it. An example was Naruto, where one part of his combo had a clone punch you into the ground and you bounced up. You could use rasengan in the middle of that if timed correctly. Anyways that is just some of my thoughts as I played these games competitively for many years mostly on ranked ladders but I did do tournaments in Ultimate Ninja 3 as well as the Storm games, I also played a TON of Storm growing up and got most of the plat trophies on PlayStation lol. Cheers and here is to a growing community for the new game!!

[kevinpeixes]

Just discovered your channel. This video just convinced me to give Storm 4 an honest try. Your videos are incredibly underrated

[Lewt_B]

you didnt mention how BUSTED throws were in storm 2. they did insane amount of damage and the best characters put you in knockback for attack types. sasori especially was insane with this because he had a knockback throw from afar using his puppet, so many online matches were sasori mirror matches with both spamming throw and substitutions.

[saltyluigi]

You really deserve more subs, man. I'll never play arena fighters competively but you're good at explaining things and making them interesting.