JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle – Review
When it comes to manga, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure is one of those series that has been sitting on the throne of popularity since 1986 and it’s still not ready to give up its position just yet. With the fairly large cast of fighters and its many story arcs, it was only a matter of time that JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle came to life. The game was already released in 2013, but all good things are worth waiting for. Right?
Story
For a fighting game, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle has a lot of story value. During your playthrough you’ll be able to choose a fair amount of different story arcs, that are based on the original manga series. This makes it fairly hard to actually write about the story portion of the game, and thus it will be more about how the story is brought to you.
You’ll see how the entire sage comes to live thanks to the vampire DIO and how the ‘Stands’ evolve during the entire time-lapse.
Each of these story arcs will have a different character in the lead and you’ll get a decent amount of information through different sets of text screens. The battles you’ll have to do per story arc are each key battles from the original story.
Those who are not familiar with the overall storyline of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure will still get a lot of information, that will eventually put all the pieces together. This does not mean that some story portions of the game will still be kind of vague or unclear for those who are new to the franchise. Those who know the series will undoubtedly love seeing all the different story portions come to live.
A fun feature the game has to offer is the ability to play the ‘other side’ of the story as well. Each arc can be played from the opponents side as well. This will not change the story, but you’ll be able to test out a lot more characters during your story playthrough this way.
Graphics
The overall graphical style of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle stays true to the original style of the series. You’ll encounter lots of characters that have ‘the eighties’ written all over them. Flair and cell shading was of course another technique to create characters that came right out of the manga series.
Environments of the different stages are also nice, but they lack certain details. They will often feel quite empty compared to other fighting games. There are moving objects, but not enough to keep a certain stage exciting.
Sound
Sound wise the game does a superb job. Each character has a decent amount of spoken story taglines as well as victory lines and taunts. Voices used by some characters are also to be heard in the current ongoing series about the Stardust Crusaders arc.
The overall soundtrack will also seem like a typical blast from the past and it will not grow old quickly.
Gameplay
JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle is a typical fighting game with a fairly atypical style. As in most games of the genre you’ll spend most of the time fighting opponents online as well as in the versus mode. Nonetheless, the game has a fairly expansive story mode which will keep you occupied for a fixed amount of time. As mentioned earlier, the story mode offers you the chance to play as the villains, or simple the opposing side, after you’ve completed it with the original character. You’ll be able to score extra points by completing certain challenges during your matches and all of this has to happen when fighting with the pressure of certain limitations set upon your fighter.
The campaign mode might give you the impression that it’s something along the lines of the story mode. Nothing could be more wrong. The campaign mode has to be played online, but not against actual players. You’ll take up your fighting skills against computer controlled avatars of actual players, to earn medals and rewards. These can in turn be used to set up your own avatar that fights other players throughout the world. This mode also works with an energy system, such as game like Candy Crush. Which is fairly weird.
Other than that you’re able to enjoy the typical arcade, versus and practice modes, which pretty much speak for themselves.
Compared to other fighting games, All-Star Battle is fairly slow in terms of movement. You’ll have a fairly simple control scheme to work with and a limited amount of moves, that are pretty easy to learn. Nonetheless this game handles the principle of ‘easy to learn, hard to master’. You will be able to perform special moves at the cost of your energy bar and other special ones that require no cost. Certain characters are able to recharge their meters with a simple ‘charge’ (which doesn’t go all too fast), whilst others can summon their ‘Stand’ with the same button. (A stand is to be compared to a certain kind of spirit that your character can summon, that serves as his new body when fighting.) Both play totally different and this will offer a very varying gameplay style.
The stages in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure have a bit of interactivity, but not that much. Each stage has a small zones, in which an event can be triggered when you knock down your opponent. These are often moving objects, that can still be dodged.
Conclusion
JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle shows us that the fighting genre still has a few tricks up their sleeves. Whilst the control scheme looks simple and slow at first, it will soon prove to be quite expansive. A must have for fighting enthusiasts as well as fans of the series.
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle - Review,
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[…] in 2014, we reviewed JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle, an interesting fighting game with many of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure’s cast members in […]