Bandai Namco announces Naruto to Boruto: Shinobi Striker

This article contains affiliate links: if you buy through them, SavePoint may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. It doesn’t change what we write.

The Naruto series has reached more than a decade of fighting games, and anyone who has followed it since the PlayStation 2 days knows the franchise has plenty of stamina. In April 2017, Bandai Namco announced another title: Naruto to Boruto: Shinobi Striker.

The first surprise was the studio. Instead of CyberConnect2, responsible for the Ultimate Ninja Storm series, development went to Soleil, a company in the Valhalla Game Studios group. And the change did not stop at the name: Shinobi Striker swapped one-on-one duels for team battles, with two teams of four ninjas, eight players at the same time, in open arenas with varied settings.

Each character fills a role on the team, divided into four roles: attack, ranged, defense and healing. The approach is cooperative, almost an online team game with an anime look, with more focus on exploring the setting and working together than in previous titles, where each fight was an isolated duel. Later, Bandai Namco also showed the avatar system, which lets you create your own ninja. At the announcement, there was still no release date.

What came next

Shinobi Striker came out on August 31, 2018, on PS4, Xbox One and PC. The game received additional content through DLC in the following years. For longtime rental-store fans, it stands as a different chapter on the long shelf of games starring the Konoha ninja.