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Review: Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Heritage for the Future |
# It’s fun to stay at the Y.M.C.A!
It’s fun to stay at the Y.M.C.A!
You can get yourself clean,
You can have a good meal,
You can do whatever you feel! #
While watching the one of the cutscenes in Capcoms’ new DC figher, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Heritage For The Future - I was suddenly struck by how several of the characters looked like they belonged to abysmal, not-at-all-gay 70’s band, The Village People. It’s true. Jotaro, with his chains and peaked cap is the biker, Joseph can be the cowboy and…er…if you squint, Avdol can be the Red Indian.
Yeah, OK then, but I was trying to avoid opening with the fact that JBA is a conversion of a lesser-known Capcom arcade fighting game, which is based on a Japanese cartoon series, which is in turn based on a comic. Oh now look what you made me do.
Alternative intro: Jojo. It’s based on a comic. And it’s weird. *Really* weird.
Having never played this in my life until I bought the DC version, I started the game up, and viewed the standard “sprites scroll about” 2D fighter intro before jumping straight into the game - my first reaction was simply “what the hell is going on?”
Because this is not like your normal fighting game. You see, you have a character, and they can punch, kick, throw and special move. OK? Still with me? But each character also has a “stand” - a spiritual ally, (the designs of which are based loosely on the Ryder-Waite Tarot cards and Egyptian mythology) who can be summoned at the press of a button. These manifest in a number of ways, from a weird guy who ’stands’ (ha ha) next to your fighter, as a sword, a big blob of purple stuff and many more. When the stand is activated, the capabilities of your character alter, and the game engine ‘loosens’ You can now do Vampire Hunter-esque chain combos, most characters can now double-jump, moves can be done in midair, and certain supers become available which aren’t normally. Mmnoookay.
When your stand is activated, a “stand meter” appears under your life gauge. Now blocking attacks will deplete your stand meter, as will getting hit. Total reduction of this gauge results in a “stand crash” - where your companion is momentarily switched off and your character is stunned a left vulnerable for a second.
I found this a little confusing at first, managing both your character and their stands life bars. Certain characters have the ability to take control of their stands directly, leaving the character ’stand’ing, (oh ho) and attack separately. Fortunately, it doesn’t take long to grasp what’s going on. It’s actually rather innovative, and certainly different. If you think of the helpers in Marvel vs. Capcom, or the Strikers in KOF99 - and then multiply that by one million - you’ll get the picture.
Though, as I said before, not all stands are separate entities - Chacca’s stand is his sword, (Anubis) and Joseph holds this big purple blob thing (Hermit Purple)
There are two modes of play - “Challenge” and “Story” mode - “Story” lets you play through the game with your chosen character, and their individual tale unravels, until they face their final boss (usually, but not always Dio.)
“Challenge” is harder - you fight a one round bout, and then after that are given a choice to regain some of your life (it doesn’t regenerate between fights) or some of your super meter in preparation for the next battle, the amount awarded is decided by your performance in the fight. You fight 10 opponents in a row. This is the mode to play if you want to unlock any of the secret characters.
Other options available are a pretty decent training mode, a Survival mode and, when you unlock it “Alessy Mode” - in which two players (both playing as Alessy) fight it out, each being transformed into a mini version of themselves for ten seconds before the other gets the same treatment.
There are also two ‘bonus stages’ available to some of the characters, specifically the main five. The first is a brief-but-good “Final Fight” scrolling section, where you have to walk along a strip of desert, fighting um…water with the objective of whacking some old guy who is sitting down at the end of the stage. It’s a really neat little feature, and it came as a complete surprise to me the first time I saw it.
The second one, which is available to pretty much everyone is a sort of semi-bonus stage. It’s actually a best-of-three-rounds fight against Vanilla Iced, but his style of fighting involves changing into a ball of energy and charging at you from different directions and angles, and you have to avoid him, then attack him when he lands. He doesn’t fight normally.
I have to say I feel sort of left out when playing this game. Because I’ve never seen the original comic or cartoon, and because I can’t read the in-game text (of which there is a lot) - I don’t really under’stand’ (ho ho) what is going on. I get that Dio is a bad guy, and that he has an assistant (Vanilla Iced). And a lot of people don’t like him, particularly the main 5 characters (Jotaro, Polnareff, Avdol, Kakyoin and Joseph) But that’s really about it. I guess the hazard of importing is that you will inevitably miss out on some text, but here, in such a story-based game, it feels that I am missing out more than usual.
I don’t know whether this is scheduled for a US release - the massive amounts of text, and the largely-unheard of subject matter suggests perhaps not. Let’s face it - the “Jojo” team are hardly the X-Men in terms of popularity are they? Well, stranger things have happened.
Anyway, this is the first Dreamcast port of a Capcom game that runs on the CPS3 hardware, the same hardware that powers the “Streetfighter 3″ series of games. And how does it cope? Well, excellently. Big sprites, minimal loading… the works. Nice.
Let’s talk about the artwork. Well…it’s different. The characters actually look like comic book characters. They have black outlines and bright, sometimes garish colours. They are drawn quite realistically - there are no enormous freaks like Zangief or Hugo here (apart from some of the stands.) The style of drawing isn’t really comparable to anything else Capcom has done. It’s not the flat-shaded anime look of the Alpha, Darkstalkers or Vs. games, nor the pastel-shaded hues of the ‘Three’ games.
The “camera” zooms in and out relating to the distance the characters are apart - and although it’s smoothly done, without any slowing down, when zoomed extremely in or out, the characters look blocky and pixelly. They look, in fact, like sprites from that old Saturn game “Guardian Heroes” I suppose it’s the outlines that make it so obvious.
The backgrounds are largely static, and are drawn in the same style as the Streetfighter 3 games - faded pastel colours and an overall more realistic look. Highlights include aboard a plane where all the passengers have been murdered in their seats, a highly detailed street full of shops, and a bizarre fairground.
There are some nice effects, big, juicy, “feel my throbbing 2D power” effects. Several moments of truly outstanding animation and some huge, screen-filling sprites. Initiating a super will cause a huge picture of your characters’ face to appear, overlayed on a nasty orange scrolly background, and a super finish will have a nasty blue or orange background, with your opponents face, bleeding or sliced in half or even filled with bullet holes depending on what you finished them with. It looks a lot better than I’ve described it, trust me.
The music is pretty average. It sounds exactly like the plinky-plink electronic keyboard and mild techno that all three Darkstalkers games have. It’s nothing bad, it’s just…well…a little bland. And when you consider how striking and bizarre the visuals can be, it seems the music lets the side down a bit. Oh well.
There are a lot of characters to choose from, some good, some bad, all weird, and a few crap. (Shakespeare eat your heart out;) Fortunately there are no wandering warriors, giant grapplers or cute-as-button schoolgirls. Oh no. The creators of the “Jojo” world are far too bizarre for that. Meet Hol Horse; the cowboy with a Zombie sidekick, Pet Shop the Eagle, Midler the belly dancing priestess, Iggy the dog, Alessy the….um…this short weirdo wields a gun, and can change you into a mini version of yourself and then comes after you with an axe. Jotaro is the hero, Dio the villain etc. etc. etc. There are 16 normal characters, and 6 secret ones. Some of the secrets are just “altered” versions of normal ones (ie Kakyoin II) - but they all play differently.
I noticed the fact that there are absolutely no “shoto” characters in this game at all. The only one with both a “fireball” and “dragon punch” is Advol, but even then, his fireball is slow and short range, and his DP has massive lag time. With the double jump, the large amount of air moves, air blocking and the stands - the FB>DP trap really has no place at all in this game. Hooray!
An interesting point is the game locale. It’s set on Earth but there’s no sign of the Americas, nor western Europe or the Antipodes. There’s only Africa, Eastern Europe, India and China. Whether these missing places actually exist in this world or there’s just nothing happening in them I don’t know. But it certainly gives the game a unique feel - the architecture in many of the cutscenes and most of the backgrounds is very Egyptian - with deserts, and small, dusty towns all around.
I have to say, I have issues with the two-games-on-one disk thing. It’s nice to have the option - but why would I want to play a slightly less polished version of the game when I have the better one? They really are very similar indeed. Oh well, I suspect I’ll be asking this question again when I review SF3: Double Impact.
I can really see no point in playing the original whatsoever. It seem really to be a waste of disk space, space, which, I might add, could have been better used with more options and features. The PlayStation version has more game modes than this one, and it could have helped extend the longetivity.
And I must say some of the characters are a bit inept. I know the rule is ‘blame the player, not the character’ - but surely the days of a character having only two or three moves are past us now?
I do like JBA - but there’s just something missing, something that stops me really loving it. I don’t know if it’s the incomprehensible storyline, or the character designs or the game engine - but I’ve had it almost two weeks now, and I’m starting to get bored with it.
It’s not as in-depth as, say SFA3, nor as challenging. (The CPU is really dumb, even on high levels) There aren’t that many extra options and modes, nor does it take too long to find all the secrets. There’s not that “one more game” compulsion that other Capcom games have.
It’s decent, but not brilliant.
