Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure (Jojo’s Venture)
Release Date - December, 1998 (JP)
Developer - Capcom
Publisher - Capcom
Platform - Arcade (CP System III)
It’s very rare you get a video game that reflects the source material as well as Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure does. This game does a heroic job of keeping the style and feel of the original manga, and what’s more, it makes for a damn fine fighting game too. Prepare for the truly bizarre and beautiful world of Jojo.
Developed by much of the same team that worked on Capcom’s Street Fighter III games, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure released late in 1998 on their relatively new CP System 3 (CPS3) arcade board.
Characters, backgrounds and techniques are all instantly recognisable to Jojo’s fans. To everyone else, they’re just gorgeous and creative spritework!
The game is based on the Stardust Crusaders story arc of the Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure manga. Jotaro Kujo and his estranged grandfather, Joseph Joestar (both characters that take up the titular ‘Jojo’ moniker) are sent on a world-spanning chase to find Dio Brando, a vampire who is threatening the life of Jotaro’s mother/Joseph’s daughter. Along the way, the two meet a huge cast of friends and foes, many of them with some crazy and unique powers. This is ripe content for a fighting game, with Capcom having a storyline that spanned 3 years and 152 chapters to choose characters for the diverse roster of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure.
Not an enormous roster, but an extremely varied one with many of the manga’s fan favourites! Check out the cool manga panel style select screen too!
Fighting games generally aren’t known for their story and single player content, but Jojo’s has a nice presentation with detailed, animated panels as well as captioned in-game sprites to tell the story as you progress through arcade mode. The game obviously can’t capture the entire breadth of the manga, but does a good job giving the cut-down version as well as including a staggering amount of details and references to the manga in the character’s movesets and stage backgrounds. In a really nice touch, in between fights the game will reflect the globe-spanning nature of the adventure by using an Indiana Jones style map, with arrows painting the continents to show your travel route to the next fight.
The Joestars really get around.
There’s even a little interlude from the fighting in some story modes, with the characters making their way through the desert avoiding sentient and deadly water puddles! Again, this is a direct scene from the manga, and the inclusion is a brilliant twist of the gameplay. There was obviously a lot of love and attention paid to this game, no doubt in part due to Hirohiko Araki, the manga’s creator, being involved as a consultant and even creating original art for promotion and packaging!
The story mode breaks up the fighting action with a mini-game. At other times, you’ll get beautifully drawn static images to explain the plot.
On the topic of visuals, the game is one of the most beautiful fighting games you can play, with some thrilling and unique visuals and animations made possible by the CPS3 board, and the loving faithfulness to the original manga series. The wild aesthetics are captured in 60 frames per second too, a very important feature to note for a fighting game. The game doesn’t slouch in the sound department either, with each character having a unique theme and the battle cries and iconic lines from the manga being replicated in voice acting.
Even the iconic ‘To be continued’ made it in!
The actual fighting gameplay has its roots in Capcom’s popular Street Fighter series, with buttons for light, medium and heavy attacks. Where it starts to get unique is the addition of a fourth button for ‘stand’ powers. In the Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure manga, a ‘stand’ is a supernatural power or spirit that can be summoned by select ‘sensitive’ individuals. Stand powers can vary wildly in both appearance and their effects in the series, so it’s not a simple job to translate them to a fighting game.
Yep, he’s about to get eaten. Stand powers come in a lot of forms.
Some stands, like Jotaro’s ‘Star Platinum’ are relatively straight-forward, a spirit with superhuman speed and strength, but what about a character like Alessi and his stand ‘Set’? ‘Set’ manifests as a shadow and causes anyone that steps inside said shadow to age backwards at rapid speed! Much harder to convey in a fighting game, and yet Capcom managed to do it! When using Alessi and his stand ‘Set’, players can send Alessi’s shadow to grab opponents and turn them into a child! Yes, Capcom’s development team actually drew and animated a ‘child form’ sprite for every character on the roster! As you probably have gathered, the stands will affect each character’s play-style and can be used in different ways during the battle. Some stands are always ‘active’, whereas some will require the player to ‘activate’ them. Some stands will serve as a power-up to your character giving them more damage or range on their attacks, and others can be completely independent entities that move around separately from the character itself. Some (like ‘The Emperor’ or ‘Anubis’) even are in the form of a weapon to be wielded!
As you can see on the right, Polnareff has fallen victim to the de-aging shadow, and has to fight as a young child for part of this match!
Being a fighting game, there is naturally a lot of attention paid to the multiplayer aspect of Jojo’s, and it doesn’t disappoint. The game is still very unique as a fighter to this day, and as such has attracted a sizable community around competitive play. At the time of writing there is still a dedicated following of players, and the game has a lot of depth across the large roster with characters that appeal to various play-styles.
The game contains many of the archetypes you’d expect from a 2D fighter, including grapplers, zoners and rush-down characters.
The game would prove to be a success in Japanese arcades, and eventually made it to the Dreamcast amid positive critical reception. In 1999 the game would receive a revision, like most Capcom fighters of the era, known as Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Heritage for the Future. This update would add more characters and moves, becoming the de-facto ‘definitive’ edition of the game. The game also was re-released with the revision in a 2012 digital release for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
Despite many more Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure games, and even fighting games being released in the years since, none have quite managed to replicate the unique gameplay of this title, and considering how much love and how downright strange the game can be at times, it’s unlikely one ever will!
Consistently beautiful and oozing style, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure deserves to be checked out by fighting game fans and fans of the