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Review: Jump Superstars [NintendoDS] |
*ahem*
Someone at Nintendo is a genius. I’m not going to parade the company around like it’s some magnanimous supernova of pure righteousness and good feelings like most fanboys would like to believe, but looking at a title like Jump Superstars makes it hard to believe that there aren’t bona-fide geniuses at Nintendo–if not in the creative sense, at least in the marketing department. I’ve often tried to come up with a potential parallel for Jump Superstars, to concoct a paralle based on U.S. pop culture instead of Japanese to illustrate what a marketing coup this game is. I couldn’t. You can’t use American comics–while JSS has it’s fair share of muscle bound superpowered maniacs, American comics don’t quite cover the depth–and certainly not the popularity–of what’s being represented here. If someone pointed a gun to my head and FORCED me to come up with something, it would be something like GI Joe VS Marvel VS DC VS Transformers VS Barbie VS Nickelodeon VS Ninja Turtles. While Jump Superstars doesn’t feature EVERY character from EVERY popular kid’s manga ever, it comes about as close as possible without hemorrhaging money in licensing fees. The pure amount of crossover fanboy craziness to be found is on a level unprecedented anywhere, except maybe in fanfiction.
But even if the game featured every character to ever be revered in all of pop culture, INTERNATIONALLY, it would be shit if…well, if it played like shit. well to that end, one could almost blame Jump Superstars for being sneakily unambitious, while at the same time being hideously engrossing. It’s a weird combination so let me try and explain: I couldn’t really, in good conscience, call Jump Superstars a fighting game. It isn’t deep enough to be a fighting game, there’s not enough emphasis on actual fighting to be a fighting game…the game that it’s most compared to in terms of gameplay is another Nintendo title (Smash Bros.) but even the simultaneously much maligned and much lauded Smash Bros. has a heavier emphasis on straight up pounding the crap out of each other than JSS. Fighting games are about learning the hidden intricacies of a game’s battle system and capitalizing on them. There’s nothing intricate about JSS’s gameplay. Whether you spam projectiles from the opposite end of the screen or stay on top of your opponent and try to maul them to death with an endless string of button mashing, there’s not a lot to it. To be honest it plays a lot more like a fighting-oriented minigame than anything else. That’s not to say it’s unsatisfying: matches are usually short, with a heavy emphasis on points, and there’s a varied enough character selection that it’s easy to rotate enough that you don’t get sick too soon. But if you’re looking for depth, then you’re looking at the wrong game.
Keeping the non-fighting game theme going, in Jump Superstars, you don’t select your characters. You build a deck. Decks are composed of three type of of panels: Battle, Support, and Help. Battle panels are your selectable characters who you can actually play as during the game’s fights. Support characters are “strikers”, characters who when pressed (on the DS touch screen) will pop in to provide your character with either a power up or perform an attack on your opponents. Help koma provide short term power ups like speeding your characters up, incrasing your attack power, and the like.
Part of the game’s charm is the almost puzzle game-like fashion in which you assemble your deck. Help panels basically consist of mugshots of assorted characters from assorted manga. Through the process of the game’s adventure mode you earn them and quote panels (”serifu koma”) which are panels usually consisting of dialogue balloons and a blank square for you to insert a help panel into. This is how you gain access to new support and battle panels. For example, if you want access to Super Saiyan vegeta, first you have to get Vegeta’s help panel. Then you need a quote panel (5-blocks in this case, but I’ll get into that later) with a piece of recognizable dialogue. Stick the help panel into the missing space in the quote panel and voila–you’ve got a new playable character. As you can imagine, this isn’t exactly the most gaijin friendly system. It helps to have a good knowledge of Jump dialogue–not just that, but JAPANESE Jump dialogue, so even if you read these comics religiously when they’re translated into English it’s not necessarily going to help. And for characters in manga that you don’t actually read, you’re more or less up the river without a paddle (there are some rare cases where you can actually match the silhouette in the quote panel to the help character, but cases like that are few and far between). While this is fine if you’re like me and you really only care about unlocking the characters from the manga you actually enjoy/are familiar with, it may be a source of frustration among completeists. If you don’t have the Japanese language skills, there are assorted online resources that should be able to help you along, but to put it bluntly–this is not a game for people who just want to stick the cartridge in their DSes and get to brawling with their favorite characters.
Speaking of characters, JSS has a huge selection, but is kind of uneven as well. There’s a hearty selection of characters, with an emphasis on the more action/fighting oriented characters (it is, more or less, a fighting game after all). The more popular series are, understandably, represented more heavily. Dragon Ball and One Piece are arguably the most popular manga to come out of the Shonen Jump brand, and they both clock in with five playable characters. Beyond that, the protagonists of the various books both old and new show up en force leaving the often cooler secondary characters (*cough*Hiei*cough*) relegated to support-panel duties. It would’ve been nice to have more villain characters available as well (the only two that are present are the WRYYYYYYYYYYnfamous Dio from Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure and Dr. Mashirito from Dr. Slump (who serves as the game’s end boss…huh).
Among the various battle characters, there are usually multiple versions. A basic battle “panel” consists of four blocks. There will usually be five, six, and in the rare case of certain characters, seven block battle panels that usually are seemingly increasingly more powerful. For example, 4 panel Kenshin from Rurouni Kenshin kind of sucks. His 5 panel version gains far more useful special moves and better linked attacks. Then his six panel version is…kind of not as good as his six panel version, despite including his ultimate attack from the manga. From what I’ve seen of the seven panel characters, they seem to be pretty heavy duty (Seven panel Luffy dons an an afro and engages in a series of rapidfire punches that would make Ryo Sakazaki turn green with envy). But more panels doesn’t necessarily make a character better; seven panel Ichigo from Bleach gains some awesome looking new special moves (in his Bankai outfit, even) but loses a very handy special move that his six panel version comes with which allowed for a healthy chunk of health restoration.
The game’s presentation is pretty straightforward. The graphics are a smidge better than what would probably be possible on the GBA. The characters are all pretty distinct and are good representations, though they’re not exactly overflowing with personality (something that would’ve helped push this game a lot). The music is pleasant enough to not mute, but indistinct, and there’s no voice (possibly due to licensing issues: this game is based on the the manga versions of the characters, after all). If I had to describe the visual/sound presentation of the game I’d have to call it competent, but not amazing.
Jump Superstars isn’t really the miracle super crossover fighting game that we were all hoping it would be. It’s more of a mix of (very light) fighting and Pokemon-esque collecting. The visuals aren’t really stunning, and the gaijin protection is about medium level, which will take a fair amount of fortitude to overcome. If you don’t know enough Japanese or don’t feel like bothering with online FAQs, honestly, it’s not a HUGE loss to pass on this title. However, despite that, I find myself coming back to it. The simplistic fighting is well suited to a portable, and despite not giving a crap about the characters I’m unlocking at this point (Prince of Tennis? Gayyyyyy) I still find myself wanting to finish up every last objective in adventure mode. Fanboy factor comes heavily into play when deciding whether or not to go with this title, and the only person who can tell you whether or not you’re a big enough of a nut about the Shonen Jump brand to fall for this game is yourself.
