This famous manga (Japanese comic) shows how "Bizarre" it can be, now in Capcom's trademark animation. Not for all fighting game fans, but definitely worth looking into.
Overview
An upgrade to the US version of Jojo's Venture, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure adds more characters, redone stages, character tweaks, and new modes.
This game has gone to obscurity in the US, but is very popular in Japan due to it's licensing. The characters are all converted straight from the manga series Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, and the game's art-style is taken directly from the 3rd season of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. (In Japan, this series has seen 6 seasons, and is now taking a break before the 7th season starts.) This season of Jojo is particularly popular due to the introduction of "stands", physical manifestations of their inner personas based on Tarot cards.
The story is that Dio, a century old vampire that threatens the Joestar bloodline as well as the world with the power of his stand The World. Jotaro Kujo aka Jojo and fellow stand users go on a journey from Japan to Egypt, encountering odd enemies hindering their progress.
Graphics 9/10
As one of the first few (and only) games that took advantage of the CPS3 hardware, the characters are well animated for the most part, the game has a dramatic zooming effect during certain attacks and the camera zooms out whenever both characters are the ends of the screen. All the attacks are shown fluidly, from the multiple punches of Jotaro's Star Platinum, Iggy the dog farting on your face, to Dio's THE WORLD!!! time stop.
Gameplay/Controls 9/10
The game can be played in challenge mode (pretty much a survival mode that lets you use points to add to your super bar or add to health at the end of a match) and story mode, which goes into detail the journey to battle Dio. The villians don't seem to have that much of a story mode, and even the heroes' story mode seems lacking and don't explain the story enough to not confuse casual gamers.
The controls aren't typical of a Capcom layout, (3 attack buttons on the top, one on the bottom for the stand button) but they're not too hard to adjust to. Button commands are mostly simple quarter-circle motions, so most players won't have a hard time memorizing button combinations.
The fighting system mixes a lot of ideas together, as well as a couple of new ones. The stand button varies on each character, either summoning the character's stand, or using the stand's ability to attack a certain way. Advanced stuff in the game include guard pushing like in the Marvel vs. games, Side stepping like SNK's King of Fighter games, air recovering, and custom combo activation for certain people that either makes the stand attack with the various inputs put during the animation freeze, or having the character run towards the opponent while you can input commands to do combos.
Also, each character plays very uniquely from each other. Even characters that are supposed to be just an alternate version of a normal character, like Dio and Shadow Dio, or Polnareff and Dark Polnareff, are completely different.
Sound/Music 7/10
The music is varied and well done, but nothing worth writing home about. The sound effects are mostly typical from a Capcom fighter, and the voice actors portray the personalities of the characters very well.
Replay Value 6/10
Not much replay value in the arcade version, other than vs. mode, and the pretty cool story mode. It IS a fighting game, after all.
Overall 7/10
If you're a fan of the series, then you'll most likely relate to this game more well than the non-Jojo fan, but this game is still worth noting due to it's uniqueness. You won't see another Capcom game like it. If you have a chance of getting the home version, this is worth checking out, especially the playstation version, which has a bunch of extras.
- by kenmastersX
