Rise of a Ninja Vs Ultimate Ninja Storm

Ok before I start this post, I would like to say I do not like my 360 more than my PS3 or my PS3 more than my 360, I think they are both great systems and they both have their share of problems. I mean, just because I have to pay for Xbox Live doesn't mean I don't think Xbox Live is awesome, and just because my PS3 takes sometimes (literally) hours to find a match when playing online doesn't mean I still don't play my PS3 online. So, please do not think I am a fanboy for either side, just because I think one of these games is way better then the other one doesn't mean I like that system more, ok now that I said that I hope to get alot less hate mail.

Alright, this post is going to sort of be my opinion on which game is better, Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm (for the PS3) or Naruto: Rise of a Ninja (for the Xbox 360). First of all, Storm does have some really fancy graphics, but in my opinion I really don't like them, they look to... real... well... a better way to explain it would be like this, when Naruto's jaw moves around like he is in a mix of the Dreamcast version of Sonic Adventure and an old Godzilla movie, I sort of get a little creeped out. I would like next generation anime game graphics to look like Dragon Ball Raging Blast since those kind of graphics actually look like the anime, on Storm they just kind of look like they tried waaaaay to hard and totally went overboard with it. The graphics in Rise of a Ninja aren't exactly amazing, they just seem like the standard for a next generation anime game, so it doesn't really knock the game down a peg, but the graphics aren't so beautiful that you would buy the game to just look at it. In my opinion I think the Storm development team just took the free roaming story mode from Rise of a Ninja and then tweaked it to make it less "free", a bit less fun, forced you to do side missions in order to continue the story, then added their own fighting system. Oh, and let's talk about the fighting, you see, in regular Ultimate Ninja games, the fighting is the highlight of the game, but in Storm all you do is press the attack button over and over again and you will win every fight, and then once your friends learn this, the whole fight is pretty much decided by whoever hits the other person first. I practically proved this when my friend gave his 3 or 4 year old brother the controller and he beat me with a perfect 10 times in a row even though he had no idea how to play. In Rise of a Ninja the fighting system isn't really something to brag about, it's better than Storm's and it is pretty fun with friends but there is always something wrong with the substitution jutsu whenever I am playing, I know I pressed the button at the right second but sometimes it just doesn't want to let me do substitution. Oh and the difficulty curve of Rise of a Ninja, jeez, I remember one of the very first enemies in the game being able to practically get a perfect on me, then when I use a jutsu on him he blocks the whole damn thing (in Rise of a Ninja, a Jutsu will only do damage if you do a series of quick time events, and if your enemy presses the button before you, then he dodges), and I'm not talking about a boss or something, this was a straight up common enemy I ran into on either my first or second mission after becoming a Genin. Ok, so let's say some nice things about Storm, well, first of all they did a great job testing for glitches, I didn't find a single one, but in Rise of a Ninja... ugh... I run into glitches all the time, several of which freeze my game. Also, in Storm, to perform a jutsu you have to actually hit your enemy, which kind of makes sense, but in Rise of a Ninja you do the opposite of charging at your opponent and waiting until he has a second of weakness, you see in Rise of a Ninja you run into a corner press the button combination and hope your opponent doesn't hit you with a kunai. Anyway, overall, I say go with Rise of a Ninja since adventuring around Konoha doesn't get boring until hours of gameplay, but in Storm it gets pretty boring quickly, let's hope that Storm 2 is going to be better than the first, because so far it looks pretty badass.