To Love in a Vegetable Garden. JoJo no Doki Doki Part 1 Launch!

It’s rare in this day and age that we find a game that truly reaches us. For all the technology advancements, games still lack that critical element of being human. We search for it. We look for the most fleeting moments of humanity in games so that we may latch onto some emotion even for the briefest moment. But once in a while, a game, a story presented through that media, comes around and shows us what it is it means to feel.

This is one of those stories. This is the story of Jotaro Kujo.

JoJo no Doki Doki or JoJo’s Dangerous Palpatations is a visual novel framed as the sequel to the commercially successful and critically acclaimed JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure Part 17: Phantom Battle of Steel Lions in the Ocean of Golden Stardust Diamonds set after the dimensionally displaced Jotaro Kujo sacrifices himself by forcing Neo Star Platinum: The Universe to combine with the negative black hole created by Cyber Dio x3442 in an attempt to turn it back into a positive black hole thus forcing him into a new universe with a whole new back story but with the same family members and old enemies so he doesn’t have to update his cell phone contacts. The will of the universe is precocious, not cruel, after all.

It is there that he meets a new friend, Outdated Internet Reference. While Reffy tries to use her old humor to raise the spirits of the now entirely normal high school student Jotaro, the memories of how cool he is locked eternally away in his soul allow him to resist the call of cheap humor. However, whether it be the effects of the new universe on his personality or that he sees a little of his long lost wife turned space dinosaur, he allows Reffy to come with him on his quest to help Grandpa Joseph with his fledgling farming business.

What proceeds is a journey of self discovery for both that will tug at the deepest reaches of your heart. Exploring Reffy’s past to find that she wasn’t always on this road. After their daughter was born, her husband left for parts unknown in the pursuit of something he never talked nor left a phone number for. She was left with only a few options: turn LOLs on the street corner for nickles, or work in “The Factory.” The words send shivers up Jotaro’s very spine as memories of his own mother returning from “The Plant” covered in green. He didn’t ask, and she didn’t say, but he knew the pain that’d turned Reffy to such debauchery. Hand in hand, and one crack in the ice that surrounds Jotaro’s heart, they make their next step together.

But is this partnership to be? Is the universe willing to let these two seek the small comfort only the two of them can offer each other? No, it’s never that simple. One day, after chasing off a wild Dio Silk Hair from the carrot patch, the world finally catches up with them.

Speedwagon, this universe’s equivalent of Speedwagon, busts down the door in a flurry of his signature cherry blossom pedals. It’s time to collect, and Jotaro is left at a loss. He and Reffy have no money. The JoJo’s Bizarre Fruit Cart business only just started, and yet here he is. The tension reaches a peak, and we’re left at the end of Part 1.

It’s a wild ride, and you owe it to yourself to see how these character develop. It’s rare that a game can bring me to tears, and this game isn’t an exception to that, but it might have been able to had I not been busy eating steaks with my fists while playing it. The highs and lows are are so sharp you’ll get whiplash just from how well it toys with your emotions. At least the first time. When you run the second time in “Glitch Party” mode, it’s a little harder to get wrapped up in the emotional journey of the angry Joseph face and his pet Polnareff breed terrier trying to have a tea party. That’s more of a bonus if you remember to play the game a second time after marker fumes have started to kick in, though, so you didn’t hear that from me.

You can download the game free of charge for Windows, Mac, and Linux here. Just remember to bring a tissue. Or a steak and some knuckle dusters.

JJBATAS Episode 3: Ripple was Eventually Replaced with the Import of Cheap, Foreign Stands

I don’t know how long this will stick, so drink it up now while you’ve got the chance. And you need to. Antfish is really good at pouring malice into his Dio voice. It’s going to be fun seeing where that goes when Dio is pulling MUDAMUDA on the castle balcony. At this rate, I could see it being one or two more before getting to Part 2. I can’t wait to see what Abridged Straights is like.

Oh, and just to let you know, the second episode is back up. It probably has been for a bit, but if you haven’t noticed like I didn’t, it’s ready to go.

JJBATAS Episode 2 Now Up Now and Dio Torpedo Shirts Eventually

I hadn’t noticed in the first episode, but Antfish is actually using the updated Blu-ray cuts for these episodes in at least a few places. That’s good, I suppose, since it’s higher quality and all, but I think I’m going to miss crazy eyes Johnathan.

This is also the first episode with Speedwagon, meaning that this is going to be the first major dividing point where people are going to jump ship or not. I would say the first one was going to be with Dio, but who really doubted the handling of abridged Dio. “Dio Torpedo” will probably tip a few more viewers in the show’s favor.

Edit: And it’s already gone. That video will give you the “Removed by the user” error message. When it goes up again, I’ll re-embed it or link you if it doesn’t get uploaded somewhere I can embed from.

Edit 2: And it’s back. Let’s hope it stays.

Edit 3: Nope. It didn’t.

Trembling Display Case, I am the Shelf Stocking Speedwagon!

Are you ready to buy ASB yet? I assume the answer is, “I’ve already printed out thousands of copies of my preorder receipt so I can keep one and eat the rest in anticipation,” but in case you need more convincing, the in-store ad campaigns have launched.

 

This is from an store in Akihabara. It isn’t that they’ve got PV 5 running in the store. That’s normal. It’s that they’ve got every TV on that back wall running the store. They probably only run that commercial every few hours, but once in while, that store has the wall of pure passion and JoJo.

But for us, those are still images. The idea is super awesome, but if you need a massive ASB fix:

Someone was nice enough to stitch together every character display across all characters that we’ve gotten so far. It’s a pretty well done editing effort, so if you want 10 minutes of gushing or just a quick way to see your favorite character so far, it’s now all together in one video.

(Thanks to JoJoF2C for posting the Akiba pictures)

Someone Get that Phone, I’m Trying to Do My Kiai! All Star Battle PV 5 HD Video!

In glorious 1080 HD just for us. This is only the first half of the presentation from back on Sunday. The presentation of the new characters, modes, costumes and what have you all presented by a gloriously yelling Yuji Ueda.

Seeing this in HD is great because there’s a lot of details I didn’t pick up from the camcorder one. There’s obviously the voices. Sheer Heart Attack yelling at you to look at him right as it blows you up is a great touch. Hiroshi Kamiya sounds younger that I would have expected for Rohan. Romi Park was a fantastic Koichi pick. Yuuko Sanpei as Narancia, Noriaki Sugiyama as Bruno, and Toshiyuki Morikawa (Kyosuke Nanbu oh my god) as Diavolo are all doing excellent work with their characters too. I’m glad to know I wasn’t the only one thinking teleporting for how to use King Crimson in a fighting game. And as much as I liked the transition from Doppio to Diavolo before, seeing now that he was using the frog phone makes it so much better.

I never thought I’d be so excited over Diavolo. I mean, pulling people into the Zipper Dimension is going to be totally awesome, and any time I play Cars will be 10% becoming Ultimate Cars and 10000% squirrel shoot, but I’ve got to see the look on some of the new fans who’re coming in from the anime when the Boss lets me know he wants on this fight from his special hot frog line. I wonder if it’ll change and not always be the frog. Maybe we’ll also get the ice cream!

This game is getting better by the moment. Next stop is should be the new character reveal on the 19th after a slight detour to get a subbed version of this trailer. The blanked picture had the Part 1 background, but I’m really hoping for the Part 6 characters next. Look forward to it!

Edit:

There it is. PV 5 is already subbed in a show of top level fan speed. Oh, Speedwagon, you’re so charismatic. He basically says everything I want to say about the trailer but with that unique energy you only get from him.

The excitement’s rising, and this game can’t be in my hands soon enough!

I Said Buy the DVDs! Collection of All JoJo Blu-ray Commercials

One of the NicoTube channels has put out two collections of all the JoJo Disc commercials. One for Part 1 and one for Part 2. They aren’t subtitled, but you can pick up on the context of Santana being confused and Stroheim being as loud as possible. I particularly like Lisa Lisa saying you can’t become stronger without buying JoJo Blu-rays. If you’re going to have fun with a series, you might as well go full on with the commercials too.

The Hidden Speedwagon. Designs from the Phantom Blood Movie

Who remembers the Phantom Blood movie? A lot of you probably remember that it exists, the song by SOUL’D OUT, and the rumors about Araki hating it so much he blocked it ever getting a DVD release, but I imagine not many of you have had the chance to see it outside maybe this YouTube video with 16 minutes of clipped out footage.

So did you ever want to know more about it? Tumblr is here to help.

These are all the character designs for how everyone looked in the movie. These are mostly useful for comparing the designs for what was a potential movie compilation to the current anime run we’ve gotten. The designs here, Johnathan and Dio aside, are a lot more normal. Characters are dressed fairly normally and the art style has a generally more realistic feel to it. I’m not sure how to describe it. I’m not a fan because there’s something about the style that makes everyone look like they have a really fat face, especially Johnathan and Dio.

There’s also voice. All the voice actors are listed there. Here’s a rundown for any you may not have known:

Johnathan Joestar: Katsuyuki Konishi (Kamina from Gurren Lagann)
Dio Brando: Hikaru Midorikawa (Lancer in Fate/Zero, Heero Yui in Gundam Wing)
Will A. Zeppeli: Rikiya Koyama (Currently Yoshikage Kira in ASB)
Erina Pendleton:Nana Mizuki
Tonpeti: Yoshisada Sakaguchi (Briareos in Appleseed, tons of dubbing roles)
George Joestar I: Tsutomu Isobe (Runge in Monster, again, tons of dubbing roles)
Dario Brando: Kazutaka Ozawa
Wang Chun: Jun Itoda
Tarkus: Yoshinori Sonobe
Bruford: Toru Nara

Two of those names are of very special interest, and I’m not talking about Yoshikage Zeppeli or Kamina Joestar. I’m talking about Kazutaka Ozawa and Jun Itoda. One of the things you may have also remembered about the Phantom Blood movie is that it was so condensed they [Edit: supposedly] forgot to put in Danny and Speedwagon. If you look next to Ozawa and Jun’s credits on the sections for Dario and Wang Chun, it says “Speedwagon” next to their names. This confused me to no end until I was able to look them up on Japanese Wikipedia and found out they they’re part of a comedy duo act called “Speed Wagon.” So, you see, the movie always had Speed Wagon. Just not Robert Edward O. Speedwagon.

Yeah, learning that didn’t make me any happier about the movie either.

(Thanks to JoJo’s Tumblr for reblogging the pictures from here)

JoJo raDIO Episode 11 Transcript… Sorta

JoJo fans are often the best. You remember JoJo raDIO I take it? When it was first announced, I was hoping that someone would pick it up for translation but knew that wouldn’t be that likely since it would be a massive block of dialogue being a radio show. Well, maybe I was being a bit pessimistic. Drakonia Tumblr has, for a bit now, been releasing synopses of the videos. Here’s the most recent one for Episode 11 where they had Takehito Koyasu on. Quoted directly:

JOJOraDIO vol.11!

This week’s guest is Koyasu Takehito, the voice of Dio Brando himself!

Ueda-san starts off with a listener’s message from a 30 year old male who became a JoJo fan back when Part 4 was still being published, and his wife got hooked by the new anime.

Then Ueda-san invites Koyasu-san (mentioning how he himself is nervous and excited). Koyasu-san says that many of his fans mentioned JOJOraDIO, how interesting it was and how they wanted him to be one of the guests. Then they have some laughs about how this radio always gets funny when you try to talk seriously. Koyasu-san says that he’s known JoJo for a long time, he started reading it even before becoming a seiyuu, but wasn’t much of a fan. He attended auditions for the new anime and he decided for himself that if he gets a role, it has to be Dio. He also mentions how as a child he thought that JoJo manga was more of a horror kind (the stone mask scared him quite a bit), but when he reread it as a grown-up he understood that it’s absolutely different. He also wondered what Araki-sensei (as an adult) thought while creating the manga and whether he wanted children to read it. Then Koyasu-san talks about reading works from the point of view of a character he’s going to voice (Dio in this case) and how it brings new colours to the setting. He says that for JoJo he only scims through the anime scripts without reading them thoroughly, because after reading the manga it’s enough for him. He just takes notes of short/long phrases, and then goes all out at the recording because the atmosphere in the studio demands just that – raw hotblooded action.

Koyasu-san says that working on JoJo anime was a pleasant and fun experience for him, mostly thanks to Okitsu Kazuyuki and his acting as the main protagonist. Initially Koyasu-san intended to give Dio the leading role but ended up having to keep up with Okitsu’s Jonathan, and it was really refreshing for him. He even thanked Okitsu-san for that after the recording.

Then Koyasu-san talks about the cast, how all the cast and staff members were “looking in the same direction” and aiming for the same goal (and this is what made working on JoJo anime different from his previous works where everyone seemed to work separately), and how tiring it was despite being interesting and pleasant. Then they discuss the recording process, differences in interpretation of character roles, Iwanami-san’s requests concerning certain lines and such. Koyasu-san also mentions how at first he thought that Dio was more cool and composed, but it turned out he was about as hotblooded as Jonathan (and even his inner monologues had to be loud and obnoxious).

Episode 3 gets brought up again (no surprise here, really), Koyasu-san says that it felt as if studio itself was on fire during the recording, he even had kind of a hallucination that they were really surrounded by flames, and felt like he himself was not Koyasu Takehito voicing Dio, but he WAS Dio and he WAS fighting there (a thing he’d never before experienced during 26 years of his career). Probably, the pacing and tempo of the anime itself helped build up the tension and gave them some kind of adrenalin rush, he says. It was also the most fun episode for him to work on, other ones didn’t bring that much joy and satisfaction, and Dio from episode 4 onwards was like a new and different character for him, one closer to Stardust Crusaders DIO (he even pronounced it as an acronym – dee-ai-oh).

Then they discuss Dio, how he doesn’t learn from his mistakes and remains too arrogant for his own good even through all of the Part 3, and how Jonathan always stands in Dio’s way and wastes his life interfering with his evil plans of world domination XD Also Koyasu-san said to Okitsu-san “You became so great all thanks to Dio. Be grateful to him! Be grateful that he made your life so fun and florid! And die feeling that gratitude!” (テラ子安www). Well, he does understand feelings of villains, after having voiced so many of them. “Do those heroes of justice have nothing else to do but mess with my villanous schemes? They really should get a life!”

Also, usually Ueda-san finishes the talk with “Next time <guest name> will speak about even deeper JoJo love”, but this time he changed it to “Dio love”. Nice touch.

Next week it’s still Koyasu Takehito.

Wow, this one turned out MUCH more detailed than usual Can’t be helped, though, ‘cause I adore Koyasu and I absolutely loved him as Dio.

Quite a brick of text, isn’t it? Not that that’s a bad thing by any stretch. If you’ve been interested in JoJo raDIO but haven’t been able to pick it up, go give Drakonia Tumblr due attention for putting these out and give the synopses a read through.

JoJo’s Blu-Ray Vol. 4 Box and Disc Art and Leicht Verwendbar Disc Art

The official anime site, at time of writing, still has the image for the Vol. 4 blu-rays listed as the “NOW PRINTING” gray block. It’s ok, though. The guys over at SRWZ have us covered.

Well, mostly. I’m not sure what it is that will be in that “Event Now Printing” gray paper flap, but the discs and box art are all there. Seeing Joseph with the tommy gun is always satisfying, and it’s nice to see Speedwagon. Most interestingly, though, is the second disc there which should be the CD for Battle Tendency OST Leicht Verwendbar. The art looks like Cars, ACDC, and Wham posing with the Red Stone of Aja, which makes sense considering that “Awaken” seems to be the most sought after track on that disc.

A closer look at all the cover art. Like always, I believe the full color is blu-ray and the halftone style is standard DVD. I like the halftone for Joseph a lot because it’s easier to see the tommy gun. It also helps that halftones make a lot of sense as a style choice because of the whole 1930s New York thing. I could totally see that picture of Joseph under a headline of “Man Guns Down Streetside Bar in Tragic Vampire Attack.”

Episode 25 “Birth of the Ultimate Lifeform” Teaser Images

There’s my boy. Or can you say that Cars is a boy at this point. I’m still disappointed that the SEX USELESS doesn’t shoot out of his crotch as a sound effect, but seeing it down there in all caps as part of this scene pulled directly from the manga makes me pretty happy.

I’m not doing tons of preview images here because we’re busy with the con, but you can always check out all of them at Yaraon.

Ahem, if I may. FUCKING PIRANHAS! FUCKING PIRANHAS! FUCKING PIRANHAS!

For the honor of all JoJo and also GeJo!

So yeah. That’s all right? Yeah, I’m wondering about the special announcement too. I haven’t seen anything on Yaraon, forums, JoJo Twitter, or the anime official site other than that the Vol. 4 Blu-rays are now up on Amazon and a wild comment on Yaraon mentioning wondering about Part 3. We may have to wait until the subs come out because it’s inline or something that wouldn’t show up in screenshots. Don’t worry. It’ll come.