JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle R is a fighting game developed by CyberConnect2 and published by Bandai Namco, set in the anime series of the same name, and is available now across all platforms. I enjoy anime, but I have not watched any of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, so I went into this game blind. Not knowing any of the characters or the plot behind the series, I googled it to try and get a better understanding of what I was looking at.

The main game mode is All-Star Battle Mode, which has 104 fights to participate in, ranging from fights within the series to a few extra “What If?” battles. I found this mode ideal for playing a mixture of characters as there are 50 fighters you can pick from, and it’s a good way to test the waters with many of them. Secondly, there is the standard Arcade mode, where you pick a fighter, take part in a couple of battles and call it a day, and finally, there are Online VS matches, which are surprisingly stable considering it’s just been launched, it was just lacking players.

The All-Star Battle Mode doesn’t really have a story to speak of. As mentioned before, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle R more or less allows you to fight out some of the battles from the anime, but it doesn’t give you anything to tell you why these characters are fighting or why so many of them share the same name. I ended up Googling the anime to try and work things out, but even with google telling me that JoJo was of the Joestar family bloodline, I was still just as confused with the whole thing.

Gameplay takes place on a 2D fighting stage with a semi-3D aspect that allows side-stepping into the background and foreground of the level. If I was to compare it to other fighting games, I would say it is a blend of Tekken and Street Fighter. Many levels hold environmental spots that can be triggered when someone lands on a “Caution Marker” prompting an event that can potentially cause massive damage to both fighters if caught by it. These events include a car jumping a curb and slamming into the players, or annoying a background character and causing them to throw poisonous frogs at the players.

When it comes to combat, players can select a secondary character to be used for an assistant role. There is a limit to how many times this can be used displayed under the player’s health bar, and the assist character will jump in and perform an attack, but they can be sent back early if they take a hit. I found they were more useful when used as a human shield while I started button-mashing for combo moves. How the characters fight can range as there are styles in the game such as Stand, which allows the character to summon a spirit to fight alongside them. This allowed attacks to be delivered faster and have an increased range, but as a con, allowed the Stand to become the new hitbox for the user, meaning it stays fairly balanced. This can be triggered with the use of the bumper. Another fighting style is the Hamon, a breathing skill. It doesn’t offer any major boost in combat, but it does allow the user to fill up their power gauge bar to perform big special combos.

As with most fighting games, the control scheme is quick and easy to pick up, using a stick to move your character side to side, while performing various attacks with the buttons. For those a little more advanced with fighting games, performing certain combinations of movements and attacks will unleash a more special attack. For the uninitiated out there, just mash a bunch of buttons until something really cool happens, and then spend the next few hours trying to work out what you did so that you can spam it in your next match.

Visually the game comes across as a great love letter to the manga style it originated. The colours used on the characters and the environment are cell-shaded which stays true to the comic/manga look, when the environment prompts are met there will be manga-like panels that give a heads up on what is about to happen. It is a very bright game with a lot of colours used. It was kind of expected, as many of the characters give off supermodel vibes and need the flare to deliver the impact.

The character audio is in Japanese, but in general, the dialogue is rather empty, except when characters are delivering certain attacks like an ultimate move. The fighting music is a bit of hit-and-miss, with the majority of the battle stage music being the same tracks on repeat, easily drowned out by the fighting.

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle R is a bit of a bare-bones fighting game designed more for the fans who have a better understanding of the series, as it gives a massive list of fighters to use with more on the way. For avid fighting gamers and novices to the JoJo’s universe, it will bit of a letdown with the bare-bone game modes and not knowing what is going on. It might have been a bit more successful if there was a series recap to bring players up to speed, or even its own small story, as I still don’t know who the villains are and what era these take place.

Written by: Shane Walsh