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To call Naruto a phenomenon in Japan would be putting it mildly. Since its debut in 1999, the manga (comic book) series created by Masashi Kishimoto about a boy ninja's rise to maturity in a village that initially shuns him has sold more than 71 million copies in Japan, and has inspired several movies and a successful anime television show.

There have been Naruto video games too, but Naruto: Rise of a Ninja is the first time the franchise will appear on the next-generation (and oh-so-North American) Xbox 360 console. And something else about the game is raising eyebrows as well: The developer is not a Japanese stalwart like Namco Bandai, Capcom or Konami, but Canadian studio Ubisoft Montreal.

Rise of a Ninja's producer Sébastien Puel says that when Ubisoft initially acquired the North American rights to Naruto, the manga's Japanese creators were "very, very cautious."

"Naruto is more than an anime there, it's part of the culture," he explains. "And at the beginning, I don't think they trusted us so much."

It wasn't Ubisoft's game-making pedigree that was in question. After all, the Montreal studio is responsible for the successful Prince of Persia and Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell franchises. It also wasn't the first time Ubisoft had tackled a licence-based project. Film director Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings) hand-picked the studio to design the video-game adaptation of King Kong after being impressed by the Ubisoft title Beyond Good & Evil.

The uncertainly was in whether a western developer would be able to grasp all the nuances of anime and manga style.

Luckily for Puel, there were enough manga fans at Ubisoft that he had no trouble stacking his 100-person team with people who were already familiar with Naruto. The Montreal-based team was a mixture of designers from both Canada and France, where Japanese manga and anime has actually had a strong following since the 1970s.

Puel and his team decided that they wanted to offer the full-on Naruto experience by delving deeper into what specific elements make the manga so popular, instead of just focusing on the fighting aspect of the series like most past Naruto games have done.

As a result, Rise of a Ninja has a free-roaming framework that lets players fully explore the environment platformer-style and interact with Konoha village and its many inhabitants. There's also a role-playing element where thew hero Naruto makes friends, completes missions and upgrades his skills. There's a fighting component too, which represents the action-based aspect of Naruto's ninja-in-training lifestyle. (Players can also duel each other over Xbox Live.)

At the beginning of the development cycle, Puel says, his team received plenty of feedback from Naruto's Japanese creators, who initially wanted to approve every little detail. But the feedback was constructive, and it eventually helped Ubisoft Montreal to find its manga groove.

One of the most valuable lessons the team learned was to tone down the realism.

"To tell you the truth, our first tries were closer to Prince of Persia than Naruto," Puel says. (Rise of a Ninja is actually powered by the same game engine as the Prince of Persia series, Rayman Raving Rabbids, Peter Jackson's King Kong and Beyond Good & Evil).

"If you look at the textures themselves [in anime], they're actually simple — pretty flat. If you go more realistic than that, you lose the anime feel," Puel explains. "With next-generation technology it's tempting to do big and detailed things. You have to restrain yourself and create, for example, less detailed textures but more objects. And that's the way to have a living, breathing world and keep the manga feel."

Mastering anime textures — which are manifested in Rise of a Ninja as cel-shaded, subtly 3D environments — was just the first step. The next was animation.

"We certainly had a tendency as a western developer to go for things that are very realistic, when for manga you have to go for more for caricatures, and exaggerate a lot of movements — very simple things like this run for instance," says Puel, referring to Naruto's way of sticking his arms out stiffly as he moves. "Manga is all about emotion and expression, especially for animations. In all the faces, for instance, the eyes are very wide."

With eyes from both hemispheres trained on Ubisoft Montreal, the studio's attention to detail and respect for the source material — the very things that impressed Peter Jackson — should stand them in good stead with Naruto as well.

Naruto has the potential to be much more than just the "manga" feather in Ubisoft's cap, however. It's also a foot in the door for other western developers to use non-western licensed properties as source material, in turn making them more accessible to western audiences. And cultural cross-pollination is seldom a bad thing.

Erin Bell is the editor of Gamezebo.com.