Roadie
A plate full of blins and a cat nearby.
I would recommend GURPS 4E. Here's the high points:
- The core system is extremely streamlined, if a little weird by modern standards. You roll 3d6, and try to get a result of (your relevant rating) or lower. (Yes, lower, not higher. There's some simple optional rules that makes this work for really high ratings and opposed rolls.) The rating you use can be one of your base stats (Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Health), one of your skills (there's a huge list of them, but they include things like Karate, Teamster, or Heraldry), or a Technique, each of which expand on a specific use of a skill, like Karate: Lethal Eye Poke or Teamster: Sharp Turn (and yes, that's actually a thing). The 3d6 rolls also mean that all actions fall along a broadly predictable but not completely predictable bell curve based on character stats.
- As you might infer from the previous point, it's easy to be as broad or as specific as you want for any given character. Making an NPC? Give them broad stat ratings with a couple of specific modifiers. Making a PC? You can go all the way down into putting points in specific techniques to represent favored combat techniques or that one guy who has encyclopedic knowledge of sheep.
- To go with the above, for a PC, the system rewards specialization, but not overwhelming specialization. Skills are cheaper than than stats, and techniques are cheaper than skills, but because the costs for skills and techniques go up exponentially (e.g. 1 point, 2 point, 4 points, 8 points, etc) while the costs for stats are flat but much higher (10+ points per rank), you get much more efficiency out of your points by investing wisely all three types. In my experience, this helps to encourage characters to have a mix of broad competencies alongside their specializations.
- Character can, but don't have to, be customized with Advantages (things like Hard to Kill, which extends your survival period when badly wounded, or Protected Sense, which ). All Advantages and Disadvantages can have modifiers added to customize them, and these modifiers added to those, and so on, for extremely intricate power creation. Even basic stuff like "Velma with her glasses" can be represented as a customized Disadvantage (Bad Sight (Mitigator, Glasses, -60%) [-10]).
- The expansion books add more options, but don't substantially expand on the core set's character generation mechanics. Instead, they try to come up with interesting ways to use existing Advantages, Disadvantages, and modifiers to represent different abilities. There are only a handful of things that add more character generation options, generally for genre-specific stuff (like carrying capacity-specific expansions to Strength for comic book characters).
- The combat system at its core is as streamlined as the stat system (opposed 3d6 rolls trying to beat the opponent's rating, then apply rolled damage to the opponent's HP), but there's about a million options you can add in. The key word here is can. It works fine without any of them, but if you really want you can go all the way into rolled hit locations, a dozen weapon damage types and their interactions with different kinds of armor, the trade-offs of specific weapons and attack types, and so on.
- Enough of the system corresponds to real things in-universe (e.g. HP represents actual physical durability, not an abstract "toughness") that you can easily extrapolate back and forth for benchmarking and estimation purposes. Some things even have actual formulas written up: for example, normal living creatures have an average of (2 × cube root of mass in pounds) hit points, with non-living things being given similar formulas depending on whether they're made out of a single homogenous substance (like a block of stone) or out of multiple substances (like a magically-animated zombie).
- There's an extremely excellent character generator available that does all the math for you, even for the extremely complicated edge cases, like powers with multiple layers of nested modifiers. It even covers weird edge cases like different body shape and the corresponding hit locations (useful for summons!).
- A lot of people have already put in detailed thought on the subject of Naruto material in GURPS, including character templates and powers that could be used for inspiration. The SJ Games forums are chock-full of this kind of stuff, accessible with just a Google search.
GURPS Lite is available as a free download. It covers the basics of stats, skills, advantages, disadvantages, and the core of the combat system, but not the more elaborate options like Techniques or the in-depth combat options.
Here's an example of a Naruto-inspired character template from the SJ Games forums.
This stuff looks complicated, but most of the complexity is in character generation. In play, for everything but the Advantages/Disadvantages, you're just rolling 3d6 against those stat or skill ratings—for example, 3d6 and trying to get 13 or less when using Jumping. (Some mental Disadvantages also have a 3d6 "self-control" roll, with a target number you can adjust by increasing or decreasing the Disadvantage cost.) For the Advantages/Disadvantages, you're just using whatever the effect described in them is, and if any kind of variation comes in it's almost always using the same 3d6 core system in some way.
For example, with the Kawarimi advantage up there, those modifiers add up to "once per turn, when attacked, roll 3d6 against Intelligence-6, and if you succeed you teleport to anywhere within 10 yards" (and, as part of the Warp ability, you can spend fatigue points to increase the Intelligence rating you're rolling against).
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