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.)

“Dude! Okuyasu! You’ve gotta see the new JOJOveller book!” JOJOveller Commercial 1

You probably remember the JoJolion commercials with Josuke, Okuyasu, and Koichi reading Jump comics on the sidewalk? Why not keep going with that. We’ve got the first official JOJOveller commercial from our favorite high school kids. Personally, I love when Echoes Act 3 craters the book. You gonna talk about JOJOveller in Morioh, you better be ready to fight. Throw that Jump on the table, lets go. Such good style.

Edit:

This is the intro that plays when you visit the official JOJOveller site’s front page. I think there it’ll infinitely loop. This is a clean video. When viewing it on the page, it would be cluttered with menu items. I don’t know if the person who uploaded this ripped this themselves or found it, but he did also post a link where you can download the music in the video’s description. Make sure and fJOJOollow the video back to YouTube if you’re interested.

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.)

All Star Battle PV 4! Father vs. Daughter, Gun vs. Gun, Vampire vs. Pompadour, RERO vs. RELA

Yeah, that’s the way to do it. Can we agree that we’re coming into ASB with a little “who’d win in a fight” mentality? The moment Mista and Hol Horse were both set to be in the game, I was thinking about who has the better gun stand. But the stand out rivalry is obviously the all out cage match of Cherries vs. Cheese.

The gameplay that we got to see with the main showcase characters, Johnny, Johnathan, Will, and JoJolion Josuke are pretty interesting. I was wrong about what move I thought would be the On Fire Fist, but we knew it would be there. Zoom punch got my attention because it looks like it sticks for a second instead of retracting immediately. If it does, it could be really awesome for anti-air because an opponent could misjudge the time and still jump into it. Will also has it, so I await my match where we sit across the ring just doing that at each other.

Johnny looks like he’s either going to be the character that’s really hard to use because of his very limited movement when not on Slow Dancer but very rewarding if you can handle him or the character that caters to spamming because he’s going to be projectile heavy. That does follow; his power was shooting his fingernails, but I don’t want that to mean he’ll be the back-up-and-shoot-you character.

JoJolion Josuke I think is going to be the trap/counter character with that all based around the soap bubble. I’ve got to give CC2 some credit for what they used for his moves because you see him using a bunch of soap bubbles as a barrier around his body like the shaving scene. He also does that at a distance, but I’m mostly interested in when the screen goes black. That specific bubble will steal the players’ “eyes” by blacking the screen so whoever’s JoJolion Josuke can get a free hit. That’s going to be really hard to use for human player because it blanks the screen, but there may be more to it than what’s in the PV.

Oh, and Kira. He has Sheer Heart Attack, but that’s all they’re telling us. I figured he would also be a counter/trap character because of the way Another One Bites the Dust works and all the bombs, but it’s not in the PV. At this point, I think we can be clear that Kira is DLC only. The way he’s rolled in with the Hayato Memo Book and the specific mention of PSN in the text on the still intro page (edit: and that he’s listed as such on the official character page.) You gotta buy him extra. If you don’t want to mess with getting foreign DLC, you might want to import fast.

All-Star Battle Trailer Number 3

Remember how I mentioned that CC2 was bringing out a new trailer for ASB at Jump Fiesta?

Here it is. I’m mostly just going to let it speak for itself because me speaking for the trailer would pretty much just be, “AH. DID YOU SEE THE THING WITH THE BASEBALLS AND THE STEAMROLLER AND-” and so on. What I will tell you are the voice actors.

Jolyne Kujo – Miyuki Sawashiro (Celty Sturlson in Durarara!!, Fujiko Mine since 2011)
Hermes Costello – Chizu Yonemoto
Giorno Giovanna – Daisuke Namikawa (Bat in Legends of the True Savior, both Italies in Hetalia)
Guido Mista – Kenji Akabane (Koji Kabuto in Shin Mazinger, I’m not even writing anything else, he was fucking Koji Kabuto)
Sex Pistols – Asami Imai (Kurisu Makise in STEINS;GATE)
Josuke Higashikata – Wataru Hatano (Largan Drace in Gundam AGE, Rufus in Street Fighter 4)
Okuyasu Nijimura – Wataru Takagi (Eiikichi Onizuka in GTO, pretty much every anime character like that and Okuyasu)
Mohammad Abdul – Masashi Ebara (Might Guy in Naruto, Andy in Cowboy Bebop, Andy in Cowboy Bebop because it bears repeating)
Hol Horse – Houchu Otsuka (Yazan Gable in Zeta Gundam, Gen in Giant Robo: The Day the Earth Stood Still)
Noriaki Kakyoin – Kouji Yusa (Shadow the Hedgehog, Urataros in Kamen Rider Den-O)
Jean Pierre Polnareff – Hiroaki Hirata (The Japanese dub actor for Johnny Depp, Sanji in One Piece, Wild Tiger in Tiger & Bunny)
Dio – I’m going to give you enough credit to assume you already know.
Jotaro Kujo – Daisuke Ono (Kenji Kusanagi in Kotetsushin Jeeg, Snow Villers in Final Fantasy XIII)

And that’s the new PV. It’s looking fantastic, the sense of humor they’ve got with the little Josuke and Okuyasu moments, the casting is really good. Now all we need is the characters from Part 1 and hopefully more from Part 7. Then we’ll be set.

JoJo’s Part 2 Confirmed with Cast! Gameplay images of All-Star Battle’s new cast members.

Whenever I think there’s going to be a drought of JoJo’s news, something comes along to brighten my day. First and foremost, check out this picture.

It’s here. We’re finally getting to see the images of the now confirmed animated adaptation of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure Part 2: Battle Tendency. You can see Young Joseph Joestar there and also who I assume is Caeser Zeppeli, though his hair makes him look a bit like Dio. I’m sure it’s a coincidence. Also, this is a much better drawing than that Part 1 drawing from back before the show started. It’s colorful, it’s shiny, it’s everything that’s making me excited.

And that’s not all. If you look up in the corner, you can see a cast list. Here’s the translated text:

• Joseph Joestar: Tomokazu Sugita (Kyon from The Meloncholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Brooklyn “Bullet” Luckfield from Super Robot Wars.
• Caesar:Takuya Satou (Toshiki Kai Cardfight!! from Vanguard)
• Stroheim: Atsushi Imaruoka (Dallas Genoard from Baccano!!)
• Speedwagon: Yuji Ueda (Solf J. Kimblee from Full Metal Alchemist, Crowe Brust from 2nd Super Robot Wars z)
• Lisa Lisa: Atsuko Tanaka (Mokoto Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell, Viletta Vadim from Super Robot Wars)
• Wham: Akio Otsuka (Solid Snake from Metal Gear Solid, Dr. Black Jack from Black Jack)

Didn’t expect so many Super Robot Wars alumni to be part of this. Needless to say, I am pleased with Joseph being played by the same actor as Bullet. Now that’s credentials.

It’s the guy (primary attacks starting at 2:53)

Top all that off with that we know what the opening is going to be, “Bloody Stream” by Coda. I can’t seem to find much on the singer, but the composer is Toshiyuki Omori. You can check out an example of their work here.

I’d say that’s a pretty good set of news for JoJo’s, but we’re not done yet. Along with all that, courtesy of this Famitsu article, we also now have some gameplay and character model picture of

Josuke and Crazy Diamond

Okuyasu and The Hand

Jolyne and Stone Free

and Hermes and KISS

(All images from Famitsu as you can probably tell from their watermark.)

I just love getting to see the Stands and characters in official colors. I had no idea that KISS was supposed to be gold and purple or that Stone Free was supposed to be a cyan. Or Joylne’s outfit being a cyan for that matter. I really like how gaudy KISS looks. Josuke, Hermes and Okuyasu looking fine as always.

Checking out that article, which I’m linking again, will let you see these guys used in gameplay. Seems that KISS’s splitting power will be used in an ultra. Also, Stone Free gets to pummel people with baseballs.

She looks so offended at the new head.

Bunt! Bunt, you idiot!

And we also see a few new maps: the final battleground with Kira, and what looks like the prison courtyard under Weather Report’s frog rain.

We just got all kinds of information today. I think we still need a map or two for Parts 5 and 7. Think Notorious B.I.G will end up as a stage hazard? Think Magenta Magenta will show up in the background with a stupid face? Only time can tell. Whether or not Magenta Magenta will show up or not. If he does, he’ll have a stupid face, no question.

All-Star Battle’s newest cast members!

Oh, right, in the excitement f JoJo’s the Animation and DUWANG subs, I’d almost forgotten about All-Star Battle and being the new JoJo’s fighting game I’ve always wanted. What could be better for a JoJo’s fighting game than more characters from all JoJo’s? The developers seem to think so, take a look at this.

We already knew that all the main character JoJos would be in there, so Josuke and Jolyne aren’t really a surprise, though it is nice to see them. What’s important is there in the lower left corner. Hermes Costello and Okuyasu Nijimura are confirmed for the game.

I really hope that Okuyasu has his teleportation just as a move and not as a hyper, and I hope that Hermes has a move where she clones her opponent’s tongue so it can fly back and hurt them. Tongue projectiles. A classic Hermes move.

Stop it! Stop spamming you corner sitting asshole!

OPJ Podcasts! “OPJ’s Bizarre Podcast – Part 4: You’ll Be Eaten By Feet!”

What a beautiful morning! What a beautiful Ducast!

It returns with the best part yet! Diamond is not Crush! Or Diamond is Unbreakable because that doesn’t sound as Engrish. Not that you’ll be lacking for translation problems or anything. It’s ok, someone explodes a motorcycle. You’ll be fine.

Download it here!
Send questions, complaints, an requests for autographed body parts here!

ROUND FOUR

JOSUKE HIGASHIKATA

VS.

PRETTY MUCH EVERYONE IN THIS TOWN