JoJolion 29 Scanned

I have what I consider a unique thing to be grossed out by. I have a really hard time watching needles go into skin. There’s something deeply unsettling about it, so there’s something deeply unsettling about this particular chapter. On the plus side, more of Norisuke using his stand power. Looks so far like it allows him to make remote control limbs out of the paper thin puzzle pieces that come up off his skin. I look forward to the name of that one.

You can read the whole chapter here.

Destiny, New Guys, and Voice Actors! ASB League Final Highlights

The eternal struggle of a man and his surrogate brother/new body’s great great grandson. ASB League’s final match comes down to one of the most iconic struggles in JoJo, and there’s lots of fists and a few knives. AI Dio really doesn’t know how to handle his time stop power. Jotaro starts off all right, but he goes for the heavy ORAORA for a while. It does him all right here and there, but Dio’s pretty good for getting inside the wall of fists, and that’s why he’s the King of JoJo. I’m still hoping for a crowning ceremony.

Just for fun, lets get a few hands on demos going. Iggy and Fugo were announced not even that long ago, so a PV and a demo were in order. This isn’t so much a match as a messing around with the two, but you get to see some of the characters’ moves. To compensate for Iggy’s height, it looks like he just has a hitbox bigger than his body. Fugo’s landing hits in the air above Iggy’s head, but that seems reasonable so you don’t have to crouch during the whole match against him. The Fool makes it a little more obvious, so it may be that the hitbox is based on Iggy with The Fool out since you’re likely to fight with it on anyway.

I finally manage to not guess traps on a character, and he uses them. Fugo gets the ability to put down clouds of his virus. Due to the low quality of the video and that it happens at the very end, I can’t really tell the kind of damage it does. It looks like it turns your health bar purple, and that happened to Fugo and Iggy. Not hurting yourself with that could be an issue.

Finally, let’s have a full on exhibition. Two matches for fun between voice actors, let’s say. These two matches are played by the character’s voice actors, Kazuyuki Okitsu (Johnathan) vs. Wataru Hotano (Josuke), and Hermes vs. Mitsuaki Madono (JoJolion Josuke.) Only Hermes is played by someone else being played by Kendo Kobayashi.

I love seeing these player matches. It’s almost like the game runs at a higher speed when there’s real people playing it. Johnathan vs. Josuke is especially fun. The combos the two pull of, the fluidity of how the combat moves. The combos the pull into their HHA are really satisfying. It’s cool.

Yes, Give Us all the Awards, and then a Train so Our Glory May Roam the Land!

So, lots of cool JoJo’s stuff has happened recently.

1

This is from an official Famitsu magazine. You see what you think you see. It’s a perfect score. All Star Battle joins the illustrious rank alongside twenty other games to have ever gotten a perfect score from the magazine. How much stock you want to put into that is up to you. Jojo’s fandom may have helped anticipation, but it may have also added extra scrutiny for how much JoJo CC2 was able to converry. It also seems to be the first fighting game ever on the list of perfects. All in all, the 21st on a list of perfect games going all the way back to Ocarina of Time is not bad.

2

Remember these guys? The OPs for JoJo’s: The Animation were nominated for a CEDEC award based on for their skill of blending 2D and 3D animation while managing to capture the unique look of “The JoJo’s World” for fans across many decades. They won. If you remember, the competition was scattered since “Visual Arts” meant a lot of things, but other nominees included things like NHK’s Tokyo Station Vision, Square-Enix’s Real Time Tech Demo for Agni’s Philosophy, and Konami’s new FOX Engine that will be used in MGS 5. So, yes, that does mean that, at least in the visual department, JoJo’s is cooler than a TV station, most JRPGs, and Big Boss. If someone draws a fan art of Araki sticking out his tongue and pulling down his eyelid at Kojima and Nomura, we may have to declare them King for a Day.

3

Yeah, the game gets its own train. This isn’t an ad bought to run on a train. This is specifically the JoJo’s Train. It’s such a big deal that it has its own website and a spin-off logo. The train is running publicly on the Yamanote Line between August 26th and September 9th. These aren’t the only decals, either. The list of pictures shows there is a decal for each main protagonist and antagonist except for any of the Pillar Men and Valentine, though it also doesn’t show one for Bruno who’s right there, so they may just not have added them to the list. Dio gets to be on there twice. You know why.

I’d call that a pretty good sweep, and I’m sure there’s even more to come.

ASB League Quarter and Semi Final Full Fights

Much faster. Maybe someone put these up early last week and I just never noticed until yesterday, but we now have a Nico video of the fights from today’s stream. [Edit 1: And also two YouTube videos now] This includes the Quarter and Semi final fights meaning that we are now in the finals. The last match will take place a week from today on ASB Launch Day.

I know the AI matches aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but these are actually not bad matches outside a few of the normal hiccups. No one can pass through Star Platinum’s Impenetrable Wall of Fists, and Kakyoin and Johnny continue to shoot like the CPU can’t decide if it wants them on auto-fire, but the exchanges are a lot more active. Dio manages to put the hamper on Kakyoin by warping to him. He’s up against the green stone wall with Kakyoin both shooting and effectively trapping him, but once he turns it around with his Knife Heat, he rallies like a train. That knife super really hurts.

Jotaro vs. Koichi has some decent exchanges, though it takes more than half of Koichi’s life bar to get there. You will hear more ORAORA than you have ever heard before, but once Koichi manages to get in, there’s some decent back and forth. It helps that watching Star Platinum’s grab where he holds the opponent up by the scruff of their neck and then hurls them into the ground is very satisfying.

Dio vs. Caeser was probably the best one, though. The speed, the fuck your projectiles attitude that Dio has, the time stop. It was nice. Dio stoms all over Caeser, but it’s nice to see their close up exchanges early on in the fight. The time stop is a good showing. They handled very well the way that it works with the opponent moving normally as their being hit but freezing after the damage animation is over. Good detailing.

And thus it comes down to the touch of destiny. The finals will be Jotaro vs. Dio for the crown of the JoJo’s Throne. The final match and the game itself run a week from now. You can also look forward to a video of the whole stream officially from NamcoBandai probably somewhere between Friday and Tuesday. I’ve heard there are some more fun host shenanigans.

[Edit 2]

There’s the shenanigans. The beginning part is them using Johnathan to show off Customize Mode, specifically the placing of sound effects. It looks like we won’t be able to make our own clouds. You have a set list of words/sounds you can pick from and can mess with their dimensions however you like. No covering Johnathan in 「ゴゴゴゴゴ」 it would seem, though that one is probably one you can pick form the list.

There are two bonus player “fights.” I say “fights” like that because these are being used for specific demoing of moves and features. Not that that’s a bad thing. You get to see Johnathan’s alternate outfit as inspired by that one manga cover as well as a few combos from him and Part 1 Dio. The big showing, though, is our first look at calling Stairway and C-Moon. The way it works in gameplay is sort of like King Crimson in the Part 5 game seemingly without a time limit. Pucci and Stairway move at normal speed where the opponent moves at something like half speed. They can presumably fight back, but they are offensively gimped. It’s the reward for the difficulty of pulling it off. On top of being a giant target while doing that floating away, you also have to build the Green Baby meter up to call C-Moon in the first place. Pucci does have a move to build it, and C-Moon does persist between matches, so I see it being used for claiming match point if it doesn’t end up being too cumbersome.

ASB League Groups E and F Full Fights

I didn’t pick up on it before, like most of the time with these, but now I know why Hermes seems less geared towards overuse of her stand. It’s not because she’s not going hog wild with it. It’s because unlike a lot of the other stands that have ORAORA that the user fires off, KISS attacks to enhance what Hermes is doing. If she slide kicks, which you’ll see a lot, KISS will too. If she punches, it will and maybe follow up with a short combo. I actually think that works and looks better in general.

I’m a little busy today, so I can’t come in with my full “pretend I know what fighting games are” analysis at the moment, but I wanted to post the video since that’s the important part.

ASB League Groups E and F Highlights Reel

And with this, the tournament is closed. All the results are in and the real tournament can begin unless there’s going to be some last minute entries. I remember hearing something about that.

Group E

Poor Joseph. If this was Part 3 you, you might stand a chance since you’d have Hermit Purple. Unfortunately, stand users are supreme unless you have enough projectiles and your machine gun is a super. And you have to fight freaking Narancia this time. Narancia was one of the characters I was concerned about because of the Part 5 game. In that, Aerosmith was ridiculous because it could stop everyone, except Ghiaccio, in their tracks by flying in a circle and firing bullets. I was worried that Narancia was going to be exactly like that, an impenetrable wall of bombs and bullets.

But it’s not all lost. This group does buck one of the trends.

No one sweeps this time! Everyone suffers at least one loss, and there’s a distinct upset. I mean, other than how upset I am that, even with no sweep, Joseph got completely shut out, or that I’m upset that I was right about Narancia being the harbinger of RC Airplane Death. It’s that Hermes manages to sneak a win against Narancia of all people, being the one blemish on his record.

To that end, Hermes is now one of my favorite picks. Not because she beat Narancia specifically, but because her fighting is geared towards more aggressive and upfront fighting. More specifically, she’s a stand user that doesn’t seem to fight mostly by doing stand shoot and inching closer to do more stand shoots. She even has a nice counter move. It’s refreshing.

JoJolion Josuke is the other exception. He has some nice combos, though he is a little overly reliant on his break dance spin. There are some times where he goes for the ORAORA, notably in his fight with Akira, but he does use some nice combinations of moves that make him look pretty good. We get to see plenty of his ultra where he steals your site, which doesn’t makes as fun use of the game mechanics as I thought, but blanking the screen after that move is used would be more annoying than anything.

Narancia and JoJolion Josuke move on to the final 16.

Group F

I didn’t get the big group shot for this one, so I went with the picture of what ends up being probably the worst fight since Johnny and Hol Horse. This is not a game for projectile users that aren’t Caeser, so most of their fight is them standing on opposite sides of the map taking potshots at each other. I do think that has to do with the AI, for what it’s worth.

The group is Cars, Kakyoin, Mista, Okuyasu, and Diavolo. It’s another grouping of stand users with one non-stand user. I expected the Group E result again since Cars isn’t Caeser, but this is the group for bucking trends even more.

Not only are there no sweeps, there are no shut outs either. Everyone manages to win at least one fight. This is because projectiles are the losers paths and everyone is able to stomp all over Mista except for Kakyoin. Like I said, they spend most of the match taking easy potshots at each other. Kakyoin was able to do ok in his other matches because he can fight at long to mid range, but he let Mista fight at long range the whole time. That’s why he was able to pull out a win and not be this group’s shut out.

Also, Cars kicks some ass without ever going Ultimate Lifeform and defying my expectations by being a finalist with no projectiles or stand. He and Diavolo are on top because they managed to fight the same way of getting in close. Only Kakyoin was able to keep Cars reasonably at bay. Okuyasu sort of fought the same way, but he wasn’t really able to pull anything off because he seemed to keep trying a charge move, like Jotaro and Star Finger, but kept getting interrupted, like Jotaro and Star Finger. He also seems a bit slower than Cars and Diavolo, and that doesn’t help.

Diavolo and Cars move on to the final 16. I’m not sure when it is they’ll be broadcasting the fights from them, but it’s 15 fights in total. We’ll also get to see the return of our top popular competitors Johnathan, DIO, and Josuke. Keep an eye on the UStream.

(Thanks to JoJo F2C for posting. You can also watch the vidoes there if you prefer it to Polsy or if the Polsy links go down.)

JoJolion Tankoban Vol. 4 Out Tomorrow

For the collectors among you, the next JoJolion tankoban will be out tomorrow, the 17th. Based on the title of the JoJo Site post, it’s going to cover up through the fight with Going Underground and Kyou Nijimura.

I like this cover art. I supposed that those are supposed to be Soft & Wet’s in the background to compliment the two JoJolion Josuke’s, but I can’t shake the feeling that, because there’s two of him, I should feel Kira and Killer Queen’s presence looming over the scene. It’s also weird to see Soft & Wet’s head from a place where you can’t see parts that jut to the side. I almost didn’t recognize it.

If you’re interested in getting it to have the physical copy, you can order it from the Shueisha Books link in the image.

(Image from the official Araki-JoJo site. © Shueisha, LuckyLand Communication, and Hirohiko Araki.)

Complete Your JOJOveller Hype with some JoJolion 19

The self proclaimed “quick and dirty” scan is out. JoJolion 19 was supposed to come out in an Ultra Jump littered with JOJOveller information, so you can’t get the full effect until you’ve given the new chapter a whorl.

The mysteries deepen as Josuke and Joshuu wander down [Extortion Road]? Everyone on the street is in on it, and Josuke is convinced there’s a [stand user] involved, but can’t figure out who it is. What is the power of this street? Who’s controlling the [stand power]? Does that position make Josuke’s [triceps] sore? I guess if Caeser can be made of rubber, probably not.

(Thanks for the early translation, Daga Kotowaru)

“Kicking My Aleternate Universe Self’s Ass” Images for All Star Battle PV 4

Just a quick little showing. Famitsu has released an image set accompanying the major showing characters of PV 4.

JoJolion Josuke and Soft & Wet

The “Damn it, I’m trying to shave here” counter barrier

Johnathan Joestar

Speaks for himself

Will A. Zeppeli

With Hamon, have an air mattress wherever you go.

Johnny Joestar and Tusk

The caption for this one is “I won’t have to go there.”

Just wanted to give you a quick overview and let you know about the images. You can check out all the images here.

All Star Battle PV 4 Subbed! “I’ve taken the meaning out of your language.”

I assumed you guys would be interested in knowing what they were saying. It helps me out. I didn’t know what it was JoJolion Josuke was doing during his Grand Heat, but the friction stealing is cool. Okuyasu calling Giorno names makes way more sense than insulting his topknot that he totally has. His classic style “uurrryyy” is also a nice touch.

(Thanks to JoJo Tumblr for being that chain link. You can see the original post here.)