a look at NH3

The Narutimate Series experienced the largest change with NH2 and NH3. What was once a simple brawler type game gained surprising depth and developed into a game that can truly be played competitively. While NH2 added a lot to the existing system, it was NH3 that added concepts making it, in my opinion, a cornerstone of achievement in the entire series of games so far.

In this piece lets see the pros and cons of NH3 as a fighting game and as a part of the Narutimate series in general, and see why this is still one of my favorite games.

Pros:

1. NH3 fixed some of the imbalances of NH2

NH2 was an okay game for its time, and is still fun to play even now. In some ways it can be played competitively, but there were some disadvantages to that game that brought it down.

First of all, characters in NH2 gain too much chakra. Too much chakra can lead to increased use of jutsus, so much so that it becomes customary in some games to use jutsu over and over, and then retreat. Charging time for chakra was extremely fast, so it was easy to gain chakra, then reuse jutsu. Integrating the concept of escape (as I mentioned in my previous post) was crucial to achieving the unique gameplay mechanic of the Narutimate series. This chakra imbalance in NH2 caused the game to overemphasize this strategy.

Second, the above issue is compounded by the fact that KnJ was way too easy to use. KnJs work by allowing you to press the appropriate button before you are hit by whatever move the enemy does against you. If used incorrectly, this leads to faster chakra drain, which balances out the chakra issue, on the other hand, if used wisely, it confers some difficulty in getting damage. Some parameters were predictably increased to get higher damage output, and that led to...

Third, poison was way too imbalanced in NH2. The effect lasts forever and could drain your life so much that you take a large hit to your life before you could do anything about it. Add to the fact that poison jutsu were spammable thanks to the high chakra availability, and you have a bunch of banned characters.

These are basically the three things that NH2 did wrong. How did NH3 fix this?

First, NH3 scaled back the way you get chakra to the way it should be. Chakra in NH3 is a precious resource. Charging it takes a long time, and lull periods in NH3 are rare. It is easy to run out of chakra in NH3, so the emphasis on chakra conservation is made greater. This created a very good balance between escape and defense. Too much escape is a bad thing; with it, players don't get damaged enough. Too much defense is a bad thing too for the same reasons, which was why...

Second, it is harder to KnJ moves in NH3. That scales up the damage factor and makes spamming jutsu less important. Jutsu costs chakra, so they become a weapon a skilled player uses sparingly. This usage inpsires tactics to use jutsu as efficiently as possible. In addition, it places emphasis on attack, but attacking the right way.

Third, poison damage was scaled down in NH3, but not to the point where poison was more or less harmless. Poison could still cripple a foe used properly.

2. NH3 added a lot of new things... and they were good

NH3 was the origin of a lot of gameplay mechanics that we can still see today in recent games. Here's what I thought up:

• Command-style ougi seal inputs - before, when you were hit with an ougi, you took the damage whether you liked it or not, you mashed buttons or spun the sticks to possibly reduce the damage (and destroy your controller in the process) and aside from the button mashing there was no skill involved. The Command inputs changed all that. Command inputs gave the player a means to turn the tables on his opponent by putting in more seals (escape!), it didn't ruin your controller, and skill was a large part in doing it. If you were better in seal inputs than your opponent, you could dominate him. In NH3, strategy and an actual metagame formed during the whole process of getting hit by an ougi. You can 1) cancel the ougi, draining your opponents chakra, 2) get hit but reduce the damage, wasting away one or two of his bars, hoping to get him thanks to the chakra advantage you now have after getting hit, or 3) get hit by an ougi and allow a cancel to nullify an undesirable enemy power-up effect.
• Button Locks - this was probably a programmer bug. A certain sequence of moves renders an enemy character unable to use most buttons except to run and kawarimi. Button locks were an indispensable part of an NH3 player's arsenal. It provided a player a setup to get in attacks, jutsu, ougi, anything. Much effort was made by both players to prevent such setups from happening to themselves and making the same setups work against their enemies. It was an added option for attack potential, and in my opinion it improved the game a lot. The newer games may not have these locks in their current form, but strategies and tactics are still being created for the ones that still remain.
  
• Customizable Ougi - there were many special character effects in NH3. NH3 was also the first game to be able to make you choose your ougi. You can choose how much chakra your player used for an ougi. Players used level 1 ougis for either an ougi based playstyle or a consistent offensive weapon, level 3 for maximum damage output, and level two for a good balance. You could also determine if your ougi had an effect to it. Example: Sasuke had a level 1 ougi with no effect, a level 1 with Curse Seal Level 1, a level 2 with Sharingan status, and a level 3 that leads to Curse Seal Level 2. Although many players used the level two, there were some that used level 1 because it suited their playstyle more. The bottom line is, players could customize their strategy and tactics by choosing their respective ougis.
  
• Accessible infinites - not exactly new to NH3, the infinite is the one endpoint in a NH player's game. Using an infinite usually ends the match - it's almost equivalent to a KO. NH3 made the infinite a staple for many characters instead of just a handful. It emphasized the importance of chakra conservation, making an empty chakra bar extremely punishable, effectively making it a second life bar. It further balanced attack, defense and escape. Up to NA3, infinites are a dangerous weapon and an essential part of a player's arsenal.
  
• the teching system - before NH3, there were only two things your character did after getting hit by a combo finisher or a jutsu: get splatted to the wall or ground, or get launched. A spin was inescapable and was guaranteed damage to many followups. NH3 introduced the wall spin, the bounce and the vertical launch. With this, it also introduced a way for characters to escape from this: the wall tech, the launch tech and the bounce tech. Spins and bounces made it easy to connect moves together, but is balanced out by teching. If you tech and recover, you usually cannot get hit by the follow up. It added other defensive options in addition to KnJ. Plus, it added the opportunity to do mindgames.

Cons:

NH3 isn't without its faults.

1. Some characters were nightmares to fight against for noob players

My personal opinion for NH3 (or any game in the Narutimate series) is that any character, given enough skill, can win against any other character. The game is still relatively balanced, and I know a lot of people will disagree with me on this.

The fact is, that for a handful of characters, the skill curve needed to fight against them could at times be too steep.

Take Itachi. Itachi had an awesome two-bar ougi (Magen: Kuroyume) that gave him Tsukuyomi as a status. Because of the unbelievably fast animation, the ougi could be hit in any number of ways; players from both the US and abroad had ways to use the Ougi in battle, so much so that one could get hit by the ougi by as much as three or four times. And after that damage was over, the opponent had to go through Tsukuyomi mode, which gives Itachi priority over almost everything AND potential for extra damage, leading to a total damage potential of around 80% of your life.

Was Itachi impossible to beat? No. In fact, knowing his strategy made him completely manageable by many characters. Was he considered bannable? It depends on who you ask. Personally I didn't think that these character traits were enough to get him banned.

The problem was, many players new to the game would have the hardest time trying to beat him. The learning curve to beat them was quite high. That's why some communities at least soft banned the character.

And Itachi is only one character among many with ridiculous damage potential. Kisame, Jiraiya, Lee, a lot of characters did a ton of damage. This led to many players choosing only from a few characters instead of from the complete list. This was a perceived imbalance, in my opinion, but nevertheless it led to the game stagnating. The game at a competitive level was not receptive to new players, and it would hurt the recruitment of new players if they kept on losing to the same guy. Counterpicking would be a possible outcome of this. On the other hand, communities learned to adapt to the character before picking up a newer guy. The issue is a point of division among many players of the game/game series.

2. Miscellaneous stuff

• Customizable Ougis - huh? Wasn't this a pro instead of a con? Well, the thing is, most players tended to stick to the best ougi for their character. With only a few minor exceptions, many players chose the same ougi for their character, as the other ougis didn't really have that much advantage over the "standard" ougi. So there really wasn't that much customization at all. Despite the choice being available, the other choices kinda sucked.
• Unlocking the Characters was a damn chore - yes, there is a code to unlock most characters. But unlocking all these characters was hard, and most players, who genuinely wanted to play the game had problems with unlocking. Look at the gamefaqs forum for the Japanese game and see how many questions there were for the RPG mode which was cumbersome to begin with. Thus, most players settled on playing with an incomplete roster and an incomplete selection of ougis, which didn't hook them into the game that much.
  
• Customizable Jutsu - nobody used this feature because it really wasn't thought out, as some jutsu could harbor great potential for insane damage by switching to jutsus they shouldn't have access to in the first place.
  
• Maito Suit Naruto - Maito Suit Naruto is basically an NH2 character trapped in NH3. NH2 in the fact that he can get chakra like in NH2: very easily. Compare it to the scarcity of chakra in NH3 and you get a recipe for disaster.
  
• P1/P2 inequalities - this is a mortal sin in a fighting game. In a fighting game, all fighting gameplay mechanics should be equal to both players. There should be no handicap whatsoever to ensure a fair fight. In NH3, some button locks were P1 only, some moves could only be KnJed by P1 and so on. Rules had to be made to prevent a P1 advantage in a competitive match. The point is, this shouldn't have happened in the first place.

That's pretty much it. NH3 was a great game, and it endured so well here in the Philippines that some people still play it today. But then newer games came along and that really led to an explosion in the number of players for the game. Next up is the Accel series.