Naruto: Ultimate Ninja, known in Japan as Naruto: Narutimate Hero (ＮＡＲＵＴＯ－ナルト－ ナルティメットヒーロー Naruto: Narutimetto Hīrō?), is the first installment of the Ultimate Ninja series. It is now a Greatest Hits title. The game was released on October 23, 2003 in Japan, June 26, 2006 in North America, November 17, 2006 in Australia, and November 30, 2006 in Europe.
There are special techniques and jutsus that can be used. Some characters feature the ability to activate special mode by inflicting the special techniques which enhances their status and gives them new abilities. It also features several items, like shuriken and kunai. There are many multi-layered stages from around the Naruto universe, including the Hidden Leaf Village, the Chunin Exam arena, and the Forest of Death. The game also uses support characters such as Naruto's support being Iruka, or Sasuke's support being Kakashi Hatake. The game features an arcade style story mode. Although the game loosely covers the events in the original manga from the Introduction arc up to the Invasion of Konoha arc, the game's twelve stories are meant to depict the events from different characters' perspectives and as the result some of them deviates from the original source (such as Neji being declared the winner in his fight with Naruto). Each stories consist of up to six battles divided by dialogues in a manga style display, one of many homages to its source material.
In the original Japanese version, there were only 12 characters; however, Namco Bandai has added the ability to separately select both the Curse Mark Sasuke and Nine-Tailed Naruto as bonus characters in the North American and European versions. As these characters were already available in the Japanese version as transformations (of Sasuke and Naruto respectively), both of these characters have lost the ability to transform into their stronger versions during battle. The original Japanese transformation would later served as the ground up for the transformations in Naruto: Ultimate Ninja 3.
