Anyone who knows the Jojo's bizarre adventure series has probably played this game and I personally love it to death and back. For starters the story should be well known or at least easy to pick up. Though it may be hard to understand because it's based off the third part of the whole series. Anyways...

From the viewpoint of both a wishful 'Game guru' and an avid fan of this series, this game has just about everything just right. It's a fighting game, yes, which means it isn't TOO complicated but this fighting game in particular takes things a step further. For the main story, you can play the role of the brave, crude, and hunky Jotaro Kujou. Illegitimate grandson of Joseph Joestar (main protagonist from series 2. Look this stuff up people, you'll love it.) on a quest to defeat a powerful vampire named Dio (Series 1) who has returned and is killing Jotaro's family. Jotaro, recently out of prison, albeit he was in there by his own will, armed with a great power called a "Stand" ventures out with his grandfather and his friend, also stand users, in search of Dio.

Alternatively, this game uniquely allows you to take the role of other characters, however minor, from the series as well and play through their stories. Each person has interesting back-stories and at least some bit of depth behind them. (Later additions in the series REALLY got into every character's life.) One strong point of the series as a whole. Though of course there's at least one or two characters that were just ridiculous to implement. Can you imagine yourself fist fighting with an entire steel freighter ship manned by a monkey?

In terms of game-play, it's very smooth and fast paced, even for a 2d fighter. Characters are agile yet unique in their own ways and have details about each of them that affects how they move and play. You have your combos and special moves with all of them, but unique to this game, and a VERY big part, are the stands. A stand is a physical representation of a person's spirit, their willpower. Their stand, it's abilities, it's appearance and pretty much everything about it is determined by who they are. Just their stands speak volumes about them. While there are FAR too many types of stands to categorize them, generally what happens to the stand, happens to the user and vice versa.

Pulling out your stand in-battle will increase your power, speed, and defense and open up a whole new list of attacks and combos while ALSO bringing out new mechanics. Stands act as a second hit-box and can affect your movement in a number of ways. While your stand is active it will typically follow your movements and lock in place with you. Although be wary, stands can also be broken if you get hit too much while they're called out which leaves you on your own and weakened until they recharge. However, if you don't call your stand out, it can still be summoned for combos and specials which, while it decreases your damage and such, lets you tactically coordinate yourself to be able to attack with essentially two people. Certain stands of course don't follow these rules the same but that just adds a bit of variety to the mix. In general, while this doesn't sound like much, these little mechanics vastly effect the way you would expect the game to play and make each character a unique experience, adding a HUGE amount of depth to the game. The controls and combo's may be fairly complicated, to extremely complicated, to learn and pull off but it's fun to learn and master them so what's the problem?

The sound of the game is more opinion based in terms of music choice and such but here goes. I for one enjoy all of the sound details immensely. The sound quality of the voices is clear and well done, although all in the original Japanese voices. The music is somewhat stylized and 'Jojo' based which is hard to explain, but personally it's the kind of music that should be recognized AS Jojo's bizarre adventure music. It isn't the highest quality and it IS still meant for a fighting game but for it's job, it's pretty nice.

All the sound effects obviously had effort put into their selection and really depict WHAT is happening. They sound nice and are unique for each of their actions so you can clearly get a feel for what you're doing. Not that big of a detail, but it's the little things that keep you going.

The graphics are definitely appreciable for not only a fighting game, but even a Jojo game. They're highly stylized in a manga/comic style with bright visuals, fitting areas and scenes, and loads of effects that quickly make the game go from just another 2d fighter to a miniature movie. Clashing of attacks against one another or against their target, waves of fire or energy or fists flying, did I mention everything is extremely colorful? Everything is also REALLY detailed which adds a lot of visual appeal. They even show their love for the game by making it so that if you defeat enemies with specific moves and meet some requirement that's faithful to the manga, you're greeted with slightly animated panels OF the manga flashing by. A truly satisfying experience.

About the difficulty, there isn't a lot to say. It's not a difficult game if you're playing through the campaign. It's fairly challenging but it's a fighting game. There isn't much to say. The true challenge is player vs player!

While the game doesn't take too long to 'beat' with each characters story line, there are a lot of characters, each well designed (this isn't a quantity over quality game) with their own stories and unique stands. This can make it pretty intense for Vs matches as it ends up being all about how the player can play their character. There aren't really any tiers as the game is well balanced. A truly well made game if nothing else.

This game has a very 'pick up and play' style to it for the most part as you probably won't be TOO inclined to go back and play the same stories over and over, but I'd say this game is still pretty addictive because it's just so fun to play! It's fun to look at, fun to control, fun to mess around with and see all the characters and especially fun to settle arguments with. Pretty addictive for a fighting game.

Overall, I can't really say anything bad about this game which makes me worry about this sounding too biased and unbalanced for a review. But I can say the truth about what it has, what it might lack, and what I think at least. Hey, with battle all-stars coming out maybe this game will be forgotten before too long...nah. I can NEVER, forget this game. I'll always give it a 10/10. And I'm glad it is, and hopefully will always be, here for everyone.

Good review!

I tried to play that game, but I just couldn't get into it. I'll give it another try though, because you actually made it sound fun. So good job!

thudricdholee : Thank you! I tried my best. Although admittedly the game is very difficult to play here without a controller of any kind. An adapter could fix that though. Or playing it on good old Ps1 or even Xbox 360 arcade can work too. Hope you have better luck with this game, and I encourage you to check out the rest of the series too! Have fun.

Nice Review! Absolutely brilliant.
But of course most importantly you went into detail!
Which is by far my favourite thing you could do in a review.
Keep up the good work! Hope to see more reviews from you soon!