Naruto Shippuden Ultimate Ninja Storm 4 Road to Boruto Review (PS4)
We reviewed Naruto Shippuden Ultimate Ninja Storm 4 some time ago and really enjoyed the tight combat, end of the story, and the amount of Naruto love that was poured into it. Road to Boruto is additional DLC that adds a chunk of new characters, and a brand new story adventure mode.
As you might guess by the title the DLC focuses around Boruto, the child of Naruto, and the slightly in the future version of the ninja world he inhabits. The new story mode goes through the plot of Boruto: Naruto the Movie, which shares more than a little similarities with (strangely enough) Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. I guess the Cursed Child was okay — I know some people didn’t like it. I thought it was fine. Similarly the story of Boruto is okay, too.
The story is basically about Boruto trying to find out what it means to be a ninja, and proving himself to Naruto, who’s not a very good father. He has (as we already knew) become Hokage like he always wanted, but along with that comes a lot of responsibility, and not as much time for family. Boruto’s struggles, while similar to Naruto’s when he was younger, have their own flavour to them — not just in being a bit more modern, but in dealing with terms of family, something that the younger Naruto didn’t really have.
Unlike the main game the Story Mode of Road to Boruto is entwined with its own Adventure Mode. The DLC simply adds a new option to the main menu, and selecting it also serves as Boruto’s own Adventure Mode post-game. Instead of just selecting events from a menu, you need to run between them. There aren’t as many locations as in the main game’s Adventure Mode — it’s limited mostly to the near-future Konoha — but it’s still filled with side-content and many characters to talk. It’s nice to be able to explore what’s happened to your favourite Naruto characters post-Naruto at yourself at your own pace.
The main story won’t take too long to complete. It’s mostly a series of short fights and longer cutscenes that could probably be blasted through in less than an hour. It does a good job at retelling the events of the movie. The fighting is just as good as it was in the main Naruto Shippuden Ultimate Ninja Storm 4 — mechanically it’s the same, there’s simply different characters. While Road to Boruto does add in a hefty amount of characters (and some really good ones at that), it leaves you wanting more. That’s all sort of the appeal of Boruto as a series.
Some of the side-content is more in-depth than others. One particular highlight is helping Shikamaru with some virtual reality scientific research that tasks Boruto with fighting the greatest ninja teams in Naruto history. It’s a great way to shake it up and add in some more great fights, while celebrating Naruto history across the board. Other quests just have you finding hidden items throughout Konoha.
It’s great to see the life of this really fun 3D fighter extended with more content across the board. Picking up Ultimate Ninja Storm 4 again, the mechanics of the fighting are just as easy to get into and as exciting as they were on release. Road to Boruto doesn’t add a crazy amount of new content (and considering the anime movie is well over a year old by this point, not all that new), but what it does add is nothing but good. It would have been nice to see more, but there isn’t a whole lot more of the Boruto story out there yet. It does prove that more Ultimate Ninja Storm is definitely a good thing — and maybe we’ll see it return in the future.
