YMMV / Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 4

• Awesome Music: Naruto vs. Sasuke 2. Some people can boogey to it.
• Broken Base: For Spaniard players, the inclusion of Mexican Spanish voice acting even in the European version of the PC version. Mostly due to the infamous rivalry between Spaniard dubs and Latin American dubs. This stings specially because, historically, Spain has received video game dubs much more consistently than Latin America^note As shown here, Spain is the biggest Spanish speaking video game market by revenue, being Mexico the only other Spanish speaking country that comes close. The rest are pretty far behind. Plus, the Spaniard dub for the anime was interrupted on 2010, and some Spaniard fans saw the Mexican dub as a sign that Spain would get a dub too, and have the opportunity to listen to the Spaniard voice actors in their roles once again.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Much like the previous games, there are over 110 characters to pick from, yet many online just stick with the Uchiha, the Six Paths characters, or Edo Minato.
• Even Better Sequel: It has a Metacritic score of 81, compared to the mid-70s of previous Storm games. Fans agree that the story battles and the general changes to the combat system are largely responsible for the improvements.
• Narm:
  • It's hard to take the fights between Hashirama and Madara seriously when they make these faces◊.
  • The neutral Spanish dub is fairly good overall, but during the last section of the game, as Kaguya is being sealed, Black Zetsu's voice actor lets out a very dry and unintentionally comical Big "NO!".
• Porting Disaster: While not as bad as other contemporary examples, the game has a 7/10 on Steam compared to the Metacritic score, due to complaints of buggy frame-rate drops, among other problems. Bandai Namco is trying their best to make a patch for it (Activate Vsync in config.ini and framerate drops are gone).
• Scrappy Mechanic: Dash Cut supports. A controversial mechanic often criticised for making players very difficult to close in on and incentivising a passive, defensive playstyle. Since ninja dashes and chakra dashes are blocked by these supports, there's almost nothing stopping the opponent from gaining an early life lead and running away for the rest of the round. Many players have created entire guides purely dedicated to tips on circumventing Dash Cut.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: While the Storm series has never been particularly known for its difficulty, Storm 4 takes this to another level.
  • Losing a battle in story mode will offer you a choice between "continue fighting with your health fully restored and a damage buff" or "continue fighting with your health fully restored and a defence buff". There is no option to restart the battle from the beginning, unless the player pauses the game and does so manually. While Storm 3 offered the option to restart with full health, it only did so in multi-stage boss battles, only after losing repeatedly, and would still set you back to a checkpoint instead of letting you continue from where you left off. It also didn't give the player any additional buffs.
  • Failing QTEs no longer has any negative consequences. Missed QTEs in Storm 2 and 3 would play a "failure" animation and deal a decent amount of damage to your health. In Storm 4, the same "successful" animation plays regardless of if the button was pressed or not; the only purpose of hitting QTEs is getting a higher score and unlocking the brief secret factor cutscene at the end of boss battles.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • Beyond the Hong Kong Dub the series is known for when it comes to non-Japanese vocal tracks, the most notable thing that was criticized at release was when Naruto and Sasuke blow off an arm from each other in the ending. The resulting wounds are really just their arms blackened to try to fit in with the blood stain, but not only are the outlines of their fingers still faintly visible, there are scenes thereafter that show the blackened arms in full view. The only reason this likely happened was due to CERO ratings getting more and more tight about violence in recent years.
  • In one cutscene, Tobirama is missing his teeth. This would not be noticeable though, if he did not grin in said cutscene.
• That One Achievement: Getting the achievement for S ranking a story mission is incredibly tedious because of how the ranking system works. Instead it being based off factors like how many specials you used, how many of the optional tasks you can perform in the fight, or other factors like that, it is based almost entirely on how much HP you had left at the end. If you are below roughly 95% percent total HP, then congrats, you aren't getting an S rank even if you only got hit once or twice from a decently powerful attack. Since many story missions have gimmicks to them, it can take a long time of trial and error just to get an S rank.
• That One Boss: While each game in the Ultimate Ninja Storm franchise has had at least one of these, one of the criticisms for this game is that the story mode boss fights as a whole are much harder in comparison than before. All of the Six Paths-based characters, including Obito, Madara, and especially Kaguya, are seen as some of the hardest bosses in the franchise. And that's not even getting into the strict requirements it takes to S-Rank them...
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The removal of the The Ultimate Decision mechanic from 3 was criticized by fans of the third game because said mechanic helped make the fights they appeared in more unique, as it allowed the player to chose an easier or harder mode for the fight, with rewards that appeared for both. Instead there isn't anything of the sort, causing all the fights to be locked to one difficulty.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Now that you can play as Obito in Story Mode when he fought Minato during Naruto's birth, you would kind of expect Madara to be playable from his end too to relive his canon curb-stomping of the Five Kage in here before his rebirth. Nope.
  • After Sasuke arrived on the battlefield in the source material, the Konoha Twelve had a moment where they teamed up and fought their way through the monsters made by the Ten Tails. In game this moment is just skipped over, despite it being a great moment to include from a gameplay perspective, as it could easily have been a level where you fight through hordes of enemies while the other teams jump in and assist, or you play as them. Instead it goes right into Team Seven using their summons.
  • Wait, Obito vs Kakashi is NOT a boss battle?! Really? Adding the flashbacks was a nice touch, but they could've gone all the way and added a QTE and extra health bars.
• Unexpected Character:
  • The Last versions of Naruto, Sasuke, Sakura, Hinata and Hanabi are playable, marking Hanabi's first playable appearance since the original Ultimate Ninja series.
  • Young Obito wearing the Tobi Zetsu was announced as a playable character after being left out of the previous installments.
  • Only one week after his debut in the anime, Jinchuuriki Madara was confirmed.
  • Kaguya Ōtsutsuki was announced before she even made her debut in the anime.
  • Boruto Uzumaki and Sarada Uchiha, who are—at least in Japan—pre-order exclusives, take this to a whole different level.
  • Itachi and Shisui have been given Perfect Susanoo forms, designed by Kishimoto himself.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Even more so than before. Especially since it's been confirmed that the game uses the PC version as the base instead of the other way around, like with the past two entries in the game series (Storm 3 and Revolution).
  • The opening in particular is very well done and of professional quality. Even the manga's critics have admitted it looks really good.

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