If you go down to the woods today...
The side-quests are fairly simply in context, but do get tougher the more times you play them and often require the unlocking of certain skills before you’re able to complete them, for example, needing to unlock the sprint skills to beat the more difficult race challenges.The initial quests see you collecting coins from around the village and offering them to the local shop keepers, which in turn unlocks the shop and allows you to purchase items from them. There are also plenty of games of hide and seek, delivery and fetch quests and plenty of jumping over the rooftops of Konoha in search of coins to get your teeth stuck into.
It’s a small irritation, but quests always overwrite themselves. By that I mean that, if you pick up a quest on the way to completing another quest, the villagers will point you in the direction of the new one. You then have to go back into the menu and re-select the original missions. It’s not a big issue, but nevertheless it’s an unnecessary bother.
Click for larger image
Click for larger imageWhen you follow the main storyline you get taken outside of the village into the Forest of Death, where you pick up more mini-missions, such as jumping across platforms and climbing trees in the search of flowers or avoiding swinging logs and working out pathways to get to a certain area. This is where the platforming side of things gets going and although there’s nothing really new about leaping from tree to tree, it still acts as a nice break in between the vicious bouts of fighting that takes place further down the line.
There are a range of colourful characters that you do battle against, but initially you’ll be pitted against a range of increasingly tough bandits. You’ll fight one, move through the forest, fight another…and so on, until you reach the final boss, or in the case of the bandits, the Bandit Lieutenant. As you’ll probably imagine the last boss in each mission is extremely tough to beat, but thanks to the deep and superb combat system, even if you keep dying over and over again (like I did, initially) you’ll want to keep challenging him until you win, because the combat is really entertaining.