Retronauts - 519: JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Chapter 2

Episode Date: March 13, 2023

ZA WARUDO could wait no longer, so Diamond Feit, Jeremy Parish, Voidburger, and Chris Person team up again to tackle JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, this time focusing their mental energies on the franchise's official video game adaptations. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

This week in Retronauts, you thought Jeremy would be your host, but it's me! This diamond, da! to you know what I want to nice. Nice. Hello, welcome back to Retronauts and welcome back to our discussion of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, Jojo's Kiyo Noboken, the epic

manga, manga, anime, video. game, light novel, fashion, queer series. It's everything. It's everything. Joe does everything for all of us. And I'm taking the baton by force from Jeremy from last episode because we didn't finish last time. We didn't get to the really, you know, the on-brand stuff, the actual games that are literally based on Jojo. We talked about references. We talked about influences. And, you know, we might do some more of that this week because there's still a lot we can talk about. But I did want to get a game-focused episodes in. So that's what we're going to do this week. And we've got all the same folks for you joining us. So why don't we start back with last week's host. Hello.

Hey, it's Jeremy Parrish Requiem. Yeah, that's right. I've evolved. Oh. Did you stab yourself with the arrow for that? The methodology is arcane and unknown, but something strange has happened, and there's going to be some sort of narrative bullshit to explain what it all means. Suddenly people all around the state of North Carolina are just passing out in their soup. Turning into frogs. Yes. And joining us from New York City. Chris, person.

I don't have a fancy stand. It's all right. I'm just, maybe I have spin energy or something. I don't know. And joining us from another time zone. I'm sorry, I actually don't know where you are. Central time, the flyover time. It's me, Jess O'Brien.

Oh, what was the joke I was going to make? Oh, damn it. Oh, it's called a spider chart. Oh, yes. Or a spider web chart. I learned this from in between the previous episode and now. Yes, I think a lot of our, a lot of our subscribers in our Discord, which comes from $5 actress to our Patreon, I believe a lot of them were also sharing the images with us, like, oh, it's called a spider chart. It's so obvious in retrospect.

Of course, it's called that. Look at it. Yeah, I feel bad for not having, and it's one of those things that unless somebody like directly tells you, you're not going to be able to Google where you're like, what's the thing with the diamonds? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I would have just Googled like DDR chart. Yeah, I looked up a Japanese attribute chart and that led me to eventually like through Google image search I found and kind of like reverse engineered it that way. You're a good Googler. I am.

That is my stand power. actually. Great, Googly-moogly. I even know still how to get exact image sizes. That's the true power these days. Fancy. Wow. Meanwhile, I keep trying to put the minus sign in, and I don't think the minus sign works anymore,

because I keep getting results I don't even want, right? Who knows? Who knows? Google's main, like, they're only good product to search, and they keep breaking it. It's so cool all of them. And now they're going to be bullied into, like, putting horrible chatbots into it. That's going to be good. Remember when their motto was just

Do No Evil? I miss those days. That wasn't going to last, was it? Back when they did no evil. And made no money. Well, speaking of evil, let's talk about the forces of evil and how our just family, the Justro family, have fought

against evil over the years in a variety of video game forms. And first of all, right at the bat, correct them wrong, I'm assuming everyone here, your first, was your first Jojo, the game that came to America, or did you learn about Jojo before you found about it about the games? Because we didn't really do a introduction last time where we all talked about where we, I talked about my Jojo origins, but we didn't get them from everybody. So I'm curious how many, how many of our panelists here, your first Jojo experience, was it a video game or was it something else? It was not a video game.

I think it was, there was a meme going around 4chan of Dio dropping the steamroller and screaming. We'll talk about that. We'll talk about that. That is video game adjacent. We'll explain that. It totally is. And I had no idea, though, but it was just an out-of-context image that was like everyone was giggling about. And I was like, okay, who's this like hot guy dropping heavy equipment on people?

But yeah, I didn't know it was an anime then, but through osmosis. eventually. I was like, okay, what is this thing? Absolutely. Chris, how about you? I think similarly, I also probably saw it the most through that, but I definitely saw the dreamcast game at like my local rental video rental store first. I think that's definitely where I was. I didn't play it at the time, but I was like aware of it and have since played it. And I was just saying to do a refresher played the only version that natively works on my mister, which is the PlayStation version, which we can get into in a second. It has unique features.

Yes. And Jeremy, how about you? You're a seasoned man of the world. You know many of these Japanese animas. How did you come to Jojo? That's quite a kind way to say old. Yeah, so my first hands-on experience, you know, deliberately doing anything related to Jojo was the PlayStation port of Jojo's Bizarre adventure, which I think in our

Hades here was just called Jojo's Venture, but I think they gave it the proper name when they brought it to PlayStation and Dreamcast. So it was one of those versions. I'm pretty sure PlayStation and, yeah, you know, that was the era when I was actively supporting any game that had 2D visuals, just as, you know, kind of a show of faith to game developers and publishers that, hey, yes, not everything has to be polygons. We still do like sprites. You know, you can keep making these games and people will buy them. So that meant I was buying a lot of fighting games. And gentle listeners, I am not good at fighting games. So that was that was an era of me spending a lot of money on games and having no real clue of how to play them. But that goes doubly so for

Jojo's bizarre adventure, which is really, you know, fittingly bizarre and abstract in terms of being a fighting game. Because it does have the reliance on stands and the stands have such outlandish powers that are so wildly different for every character. And, you know, they all make sense now that I go back and see them with the knowledge of what the show and the story actually was. But at the time, I was just like, I don't understand why anyone does anything. And I don't understand why my guy is just standing there looking cool while I'm actually controlling a thing behind him, but I'm supposed to, like, hurt the other guy who's standing there

looking cool instead of the thing that's trying to hurt me that he's controlling. And I don't know why he keeps stopping time and I can't do anything about it. It was just, it was not a satisfactory experience. It also doesn't help that I, I tend to gravitate towards small, fast characters. So I immediately went for Iggy and Midler, who of course has nothing to do with anything based on, you know, the original story. But they, the two of them have them, I would say, the most abstract power set in the video game. So that was just like, you know, it's like if you jump into Street Fighter 3 and your first thought is, I'm going to play, you know, Oro. You're just asking for trouble, and that's exactly what I did.

So, yeah, it wasn't a great experience, but it didn't turn me off from the franchise. It just made me realize, I don't understand this video game in any way whatsoever. But, you know, when I finally had the opportunity to sit down and really invest myself in the show, I enjoyed it. But, you know, even before that, I would say kind of relevant to the larger discussion, Jojo concepts and references had already woven themselves into American internet discourse by that point, you know, for people who had imported either early games or, you know, watched some of those early OAVs or imported the manga. And so you would see references to the world or Zawarado online back in the 90s. Um, so there was always this kind of like nebulous cloud of Jojo hovering over the discourse anywhere I went for a very long time. Um, you know, uh, Deo going rye, but seeing that caption for other characters like Philippe from Aikwood, uh, people doing photo edits and that sort of thing. So, um, yeah, uh, Jojo is just kind of baked in there. But my, my introduction was a little rough. And, you know, I, I still, um, continue to go back and say, oh, that was a Jojo reference. When things like, oh, the fan

translation group Stardust Crusaders, they're named after an entire chapter of Jojo. I had no idea at the time, you know, in the late 90s, early 2000s, when I was downloading their, their ROM translations. And I didn't know what that was a reference to, but now I know. There's something funny about, like, how Jojo's and the internet have kind of like, I don't know, really symbiotically latched onto each other in a really interesting way. Like, I feel like even from the early ages of the internet, there was Jojo like swirling around somewhere. And like now that everyone pretty much has the internet, everyone kind of knows a little bit about Jojos, even if they don't recognize it as such.

Yeah, Jojo Star Dust Crusaders ended at almost exactly the same time that the W3 Consortium finished the spec for the World Wide Web. So basically, right as Jojo was hitting its most iconic and, I guess, best known, best loved narrative climax, the World Wide Web was being born. Man, perfect timing. Yeah, it was just there, right there waiting to happen. You know, it's funny, I'm old enough to remember a time when Googling Jojo in English only returned results from that pop singer. like just hundreds and hundreds of pages of her or that

isn't there an R&B guy like Casey and Jojo but in any case for years when I only had vague memories of things I saw in Japan and the OVA stuff I remember I would Google stuff like in the early 2000s

I would try to find like more information about Jojo and if I didn't type it in Japanese all I would get was just yeah a bunch of stuff that didn't have anything to do with what I was trying to find out and when I did do Google in Japanese it would always be like you know just fan pages and weird

little like, you know, communities. I know before I learned anything about anything else, I would find fan pages where everyone would just would get together and they would be like, they would be posing. They'd be jojo pose. And in Japanese, it's called Jojo Tachi, which is literally like Jojo stand. And one of the earliest ones that struck me was, it's from the manga, it's from the very first, the very first book of the manga, Dio, when his dad is dying, he's

sitting there and he's reading a book and he's holding a book in one hand. Yeah. And listeners, if you haven't done this already, look this up. He is holding a book in one hand with, like, two fingers in front of the page and two fingers behind the book. It is – I don't know how he does it. How do you turn the pages? I don't understand how he's doing that. He was always special.

Yeah, it's physically impossible. It's so cool. It is the wildest – it's the wildest hand. It's just the weirdest thing. He's already got a stand power, and it's reading. Yeah. For the longest time, I actually kind of mentally conflated – Jojo's Bazaar Adventure and Joey Jojo Shabbado or whatever it is. Yeah.

Like I would see those things reference in totally different context, but you know, you've got the Jojo in there and it just always kind of, because they were unfamiliar to me, just kind of conflated into one. And, you know, there's probably an entire generation of people now who think that Bart Simpson's middle name is a reference to Jojo's Bizarre Adventure as opposed to the singer or whatever. I didn't know Bart's middle name. It is. His middle name is Jojo. So he probably has some sort of, he probably has a star tattoo that we don't even know about. I thought of Jojo Simpson. What the hell? I'm not misremembering that. Am I? That's not the trivia. I was ready to learn today. That's correct. That's right. That's canon. I'm sure. I'm positive. I've seen the episode. I'm, I'm Googling this. It was definitely said out loud. I don't know if it was retconned, but it's definitely a line from the show. I just don't know if it was.

Jojo Bouvier, his, I guess, a maternal uncle. So, Bart's full name is Bartholomeo Jojo Simpson. What? So he would be Barjo. Exactly. Oh, my God. My son is also a Jojo. Nice.

Yeah, where does he fit in the Joe Star Canon? Like, where in the tree? Canonically, he would be before Stardust, right? Well, I guess, I guess it depends on the timeline you're looking at, because I'm sure they've adjusted the scale of the Simpsons continuity from, you know, when, uh, when Homer and Marge, you know, dated in the late 70s. Yeah. That wouldn't make sense now. So I'm sure it's been, it's been adjusted. But yeah, Bart would have been like, uh, about probably born like 1980s. So he would have been, uh, you know, a child. Yeah, he would have been, yeah, Joske's age.

Yeah, like seven years old during Stardust Crusaders, nine years old. Yeah, so it depends on where he ends up. He may end up in diamond a little bit. I mean, I could see retooling the Mario arc as a Springfield arc. Oh, my God. This is getting into, like, really bad fan fiction, so let's maybe throw the line here. I bet it already exists. Also, you have, I do like, I do appreciate that the artists, like, re-drew him.

Like, originally he was seven feet tall and, like, really muscular during the Tracy Olman days. And then he then they- I thought you were talking about Bart Simpson, you thought you're being for real. I'm so tired. Yeah, you got to look at those early Tracy Oman shorts where he was like super buff. Yeah, he was hanging with Bronson. Oh, I'm so gullible.

Jeez. So move your body. Yep, you got the nation. Front the back in a rock like motion. Now that you got it if you think you can. Do it through the news. That's the Bartman. Everybody, if you can do the fireman.

Whoa. Shake it out, turn it out. Get it out, man. To the science as you can't get. Bartman. Everybody in the house to the house. Anyway, if you can't do the phone, man. Check your party, turn it out.

Anyway, that was quite a tangent. It's fine. I'm so amused right now. Let's turn back the clock. Let's go back to the beginning, because guess what, folks, the first Jojo game was not a jojo game at all. It was actually a Famicom jump game. Yes.

back in 1989 for the Famicom, obviously only in Japan. It was called Famicom Jump Hero Ritsuddin, or A.U. Ritsiden. And it was celebrating 20 years of Shonen Jump, which was the weekly magazine that includes Jojo and many, many other popular characters that you've probably already heard of. And the way it works is they've thrown the kitchen sink. This game has all the characters you've probably, like the kids at the time would have known and loved. And as you play through the game with your, I think your generic hero, you meet other heroes and you sort of pal around with them and you go on an adventure and then you leave them behind and meet new heroes.

And since this was 1989, the Jojo in question was Joseph. Joseph Joe Star is the Jojo representation in this game. Yes. And you can meet him and you can hang out with him. And there's a mini game where you have to rhythmally tap the button to get Joseph to climb the oily tower, just like he did, you know, to practice his. hormone training, which, yeah, there really is a part in the manga where you have a muscular man climbing a tower that's covered in slick oil because he's got to learn. He's got to learn how to do it. And it's surprisingly intense. And it's less episodes than I remember it being

actually. Like for how, I had this like recollection of it being like, I don't know, like a four episode arc for some reason of climbing an oily tower because it was so like stressful, but like super duper interesting and then like I rewatched it like a I don't know a couple months ago and I was like wow this is only like it's 10 minutes yeah it's like a tiny section it's like why did I have this huge impression

on me yeah the whole Haman training section actually takes fewer episodes than I seem to remember when I rewatched it I guess it just it just feels like they compressed a lot into those couple of episodes

they wonder yeah they got Phantom Blood and Battle Tendency sort of together into one season. And they did what it, they did what they needed to do. And I appreciate that. It's brevity. Brevity was wielded skillfully. Yeah. Yeah.

Famicom Jump is one of those games that, um, when people ask me, hey, are you going to continue making videos about the chronology of Famicom games? I say, no, Krontendo's already done that. Yes. Because, asterisk, I don't want to play crap like Famicom Jump. It just looks terrible. It's bad, you know, like clearly, clearly based on like the framework of Dragon Quest, but instead of being good, it's actually bad. And it has lots of mini-game type things. Yeah, relevant to Jojo, there's a, like, a fighting segment where Joseph has to fight Santana. But it's not like a proper fighting game. It's literally just like Santana like walks toward you in every couple of seconds. He sort of does this, like, open palm punch sort of thing.

And he's got a longer reach than Joseph. So if you approach him at the wrong time, he'll slap you and you'll take a hit. But otherwise, you just walk up in between those slaps and punch him with your one move that you can do. And you have to do that until you wear down his health before he wears yours down. It just, it looks awful. And yet, it's producer. I see in the notes here. It would go on to do cool stuff.

Diamond, do you found out this detail, so I don't want to spoil it for you. Yes, well, the game was developed by Tosei, you know, the shadow developer behind so many games on the Famicom. And because he was at Bandai at the time, the producer was Shinji Hashimoto, who would later go on for about a decade. I think he would become the brand manager for Final Fantasy. So he has, I don't know what he's up to right now, but he's, I know he left square. Yeah. When Final Fantasy 14, his baby turned out to be an abomination and a disaster, he kind of left the company. Oh, that was the time. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, then Yoshi P stepped in and took over and now everyone loves it. But yeah, I think he just kind of went on to like management heaven. I'm sure he has a corner office someplace where he's doing something of no significance, which is a shame. But yeah, he was. He was involved in Final Fantasy games, front mission was also his baby.

And, you know, you could see the potential for disaster written all over this game. So I guess his career unfortunately came full circle. Very sad. Anyway, as you mentioned previously, yes, the good Dr. Sparkle has indeed covered this game in his Cron Tendo video game series. If you go to episode 42, he will cover that, he will mention this game. he'll show you for a few minutes of it, and you can move on with your life. I don't, yeah, I don't think there's any reason to play this game for any reason. I don't even think there's a translation.

There might be a translation patch, but do you need this? I don't think you need this. I don't think anyone needs this. Oh, it is fully translated as of September of last year. Domhacking.net, Famicom Jump, Eurazuddin. Thank you, Black Paladin for bringing that joy into our lives. Now you have to play it. Do we.

Oh, you're not my dad. By the way, I googled it, and these days, Shinji Hashimoto is at Sony Music Entertainment Japan. So, that's probably pleasant. He's got a gig. That's a pleasant. Yeah, that sounds like a good gig. You just go to, like, Virgin Megastores or whatever.

Like, you just make sure everything. Yeah, you just make sure people, he's like, everybody, is everyone still buying physical albums? Yes. Okay. Have you heard this new AK-48, AK-B-48 album? It's really good. Here, I'll play it. the sample for you.

I don't have to work for King Records or whatever. Well, whatever happened to Famicom Jump, it must have sold a truck ton because, lo and behold, two years later, we have Famicom Jump to the strongest seven, Saiky on Was Chichenin.

And this is another Famicom Exclusive, Netanyi 1. It's another crossover game, but this one is very different because the first game was like a sort of a world tour of all things Shonen Jump. In this game, you get a choice of seven heroes.

you pick one of them, and that's the guy you play for the whole game. And the game sort of adjusts around that structure. So I'll be honest, you know, I thought I knew a lot of Shonen Jump characters, but of the seven characters that are in this game, I only recognize, like, less than half of them. Yeah. You know, you got Goku, and you got, because in 1989, Joseph is out and Jotoro is now the Jojo, and then, like, there's a Rokanashi Blues guy. There's a cop from Cochikame, but, like, I don't know who jungle.

King Tarchan is. I don't know who magical Taruduroto is. I do not know those characters. I'm sure they're big for somebody. I only know of magical Tarutu because there's a bunch of Game Boy games based on it and I had to like plan out coverage of those games. And also like Famicom, I don't intend to keep going with Japanese Game Boy coverage because there are so many of these bad games on Japanese Game Boy. It's just not worth my time, my energy, my life. It's killing me, man. It was a boom, and, like, there was just a ton, a ton of, ton of stuff coming out. And a lot of it was, like, this crossover, like, sort of like, oh, let's trick the kids into buying this because they recognize all these people, you know, sort of things. And it's like, they're not invested in making the game good. It's just, like, do my favorite characters show up in it? Cool. I'll buy it.

Yeah, Game Boy was super cheap to develop for. So companies like Bondi, Ben Presto, would just, you know, farm them out to low-cost bidder development studios. and whip something up in a few months, put it out there. Who cares if it's any good? In fact, maybe being good would be detrimental because it's for children. They're too young. They haven't developed good taste yet.

They'll just keep playing something. And if they don't succeed at it, they'll just think it's because they're too small and stupid to succeed. So it's on them. Yeah, that's the Game Boy, the Game Boy world and the Famicom world. And it's bleak. And now that's mobile world. Well, this title was developed by Chunsoft, and I would say, you know, two years later, I think this game actually looks a lot better than the first game.

I do enjoy, I do enjoy the fact that, you know, you have a random encounter pop up, but now the battles are kind of like you've got some larger characters on a little, a little map screen, and you have to, like, run around and fight the characters that appear. And if you pick Jotoro, then, yeah, you've got a little kind of chibi Jotero on the screen, and he can run around and he can punch and kick, or he can summon start. Platinum and Punch People. It's all pretty cutesy. But the enemies are kind of generic because, like, you know, because you can play the game as a bunch of different guys, the generally speaking, the enemies you fight are just random RPG enemies. So it's like, do you want to see Jotoro fight slimes with Star Platinum? Then here, this is a game for you. Kind of, yeah.

I was going to say, like, I was like, oh, I should look this up. I want to see a cute little cheeby Jotoro. And it's like, wow, this just looks like an asset swap of like every other RPG from the time. And if you told me, like, this is actually, like, Jotaro you're looking at, it's like, you, I would not know. It's just a little guy. Oh, you can tell. You can tell us Jotaro because he's, he's standing there with his Janet Jackson coat. Thank you for that piece of knowledge last episode, with his hand in his pocket. And he's got the police cap. Like, you can tell. You can tell it's Joe. I'm looking at a screenshot of little tiny Goku. And I can only tell his Goku because he's wearing orange. Like, really. Oh, he's got spiky hair also. Come on. He's like 8-bit. He's teeny tiny. He is. But I guess you just have to have been experienced enough with 8-bit games to be able to...

There's overworld portraits. Those look better. Well, also, there's a difference between like the overworld sprites when you're exploring and the combat sprites where everything is bigger. And the combat system in this kind of reminds me of maybe like shining force where you have a limited amount of movement and then kind of like simple commands for. combat. It's not like, it's not like, you know, like lunar or something where you have free movement on the map and then like a huge pallet of moves. It's more like, you can do one of three things. So kind of fire emblemish, I guess. So if you want to see like a very simplified fire emblem where Goku teams up with Jotaro, I mean, that actually sounds kind of good. So I would like to see this game get a fan translation. It hasn't yet. But this seems way more

valuable as, like, an object that exists in the world than the first Famicom Jump. So that's good. So moving on to almost exactly 30 years ago, I think it was, I think it launched in the spring of 1993 we have at last a proper Jojo game titled Just Jojo's Bear Adventure, Jojo to Kim Noboken. This was on the Super Famicom and it was developed by Winkysoft which is a studio-based rice here in Osaka but they're no longer with us, RIP.

That's a shame. The name is so good. Yes, and again, I know somewhere in the credits, Hashimoto was on the credits again so I don't know, he's still got his fingers in the Jojo Pi somehow. And this is published by Kobo team right before Square bought them out and made them as part of the Square family. Is this the same Shinji Hashimoto?

I feel like there... I feel like I kind of went through this with some other Winkysoft game that I covered for Game Boy Works. And I think there might be multiple Shinji Hashimoto's who were working in the games industry at the time because he was supposedly with Square Soft at the time, but also doing other stuff. I don't know. It's confusing. Kind of like how Squarespace employed two Tetsuya Takahashi's at the same time. One was like, you know, a character illustrator and one was a background

illustrator or something. Or no, one was like a director. The other was a background illustrator. So, yeah. Like Shinji's a really common name and so is Hashimoto. So that wouldn't be surprising. It's just two different guys, same name. I mean, Japanese Wikipedia believes it's the same Hashimoto, because they've got They've got his career broken down by company, and they have his, you know, they have his work on Bandai. They have his work for Cobra team. Apparently, he was also connected to the bastard Super Famicom game.

So I think it's the same Hashimoto, Shinji. I mean, that name is not exactly uncommon. So, yeah, you could have another Shinji Hashimoto there, but I think this is the same Shinji Hashimoto. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I'm looking at his CV on Moby Games, and it looks like he was doing Bandai stuff, you know, working on Mobile Suit Z Gundam Hot Scramble in 1986 up until about the time this came out and then he jumped over to Squarespaceoft.

So, yeah, all right, I'm with it. Maybe this played a role in him switching over to Square. Could be. You know, they got involved. Who knows? But it is indeed another RPG, but this is a very different kind of RPG. Some people call it a side-scrolling RPG.

It is... It looks weird. It looks very... Very weird. It's a very weird. I thought it took me like, because I've never seen gameplay until we were like of this or like it's been a minute. I don't know. It's like a lot of these things that you sort of just like blend together.

You're like, is this, is this real? You know, like is this a real or is this like a weird flash game that somebody made to approximate this? I was like, no, this is real. This is a real game, you know? It's a real game. It's a real cartridge. I'm sure it's probably out. It's probably a hot collectible given the property, you know?

but yeah your character is sort of walks back and forth on the screen and they can they can investigate little things they can go through doorways they can talk to NPCs but really I think one of the stranger aspects of this game is the fact that almost all of the action is in a very tight rectangle in the middle of the screen and just so much the space left behind is just empty black like void it's kind of stylish though I don't know it kind of reminds me of the cutscenes and ninja guidance where, you know, they were like, or even Fantasy Star before Fantasy Star 4 was like, let's overlap panels. But it's just like, what if you could move around in a frame of a Ninja Guideon cutscene and like, you know, control your character and look at stuff? And I'm sure they did this one because the small rectangle, you know, they could only afford to create unique assets for so many locations in the game by basically filling the screen with black. But also, like, they use this kind of side view where your character, like their bust is basically front and center and kind of dominating the image because they wanted to, you know, really push like, hey, here are the characters that you know and love. We're not going to reduce them to tiny little, you know, eight pixel sprites with giant heads. These are, you know, portraits that you recognize from the manga. And so this was kind of their way of achieving that without compromise.

But it's really interesting how that sort of manga panel that framing follows throughout the entire game, including combat scenes and stuff. It's like, here is a game that is basically like watching a video CD window in 1996 on your, you know, on your computer or whatever. It's, you know, real player, basically, the video game. Yeah, but we should also stress, though, because the image space is so tight, nobody has any legs. No, that's true. Everyone is just from the waist up. No one's got, no one legs. Half the Jojo Post potential is gone immediately.

Yeah, but meanwhile, Rob Lefield is like, God damn, I could have made a Youngblood game like this. Rob, Leifield vibrating somewhere. All I know, the only, the main screenshot I've seen from it, like I watch a budget gameplay of it is just the part where Joe, uh, uh, Jotaro pisses. There is a urination scene, like, at some point where it's like, it just says, Jotaro did his business. They actually, I was scrolling around in this long play, and Kakioin was the playable character.

And Kakioen went to the, you can go to the bathroom, investigate the bathroom, and then he, like, faces away from the camera. And it just says, Kakioen did his business. Yeah, same thing. I think you can do it with both of them. I wonder how far back pissing in video games goes. This would be a good. That would be good long form.

for video. It's just the history of taking a piss and a video game. And then we and then we have the David Cage Renaissance. Can we call it? Whiz Kids? The history of peeing in video games. Oh, man. At least in the case of Stardis Crusaders, there is indeed a canon part where

Pulnerf and Abdul pissing that guy's like breathing tube. There's a lot of like toilet focused stuff in Stardust Crusaders. Iraq was very disturbed by toilets. Polnaref, yeah. He had that whole like toilet phobia and everything goes wrong when Polneriffe goes to the bathroom like that's just like what happens

it's like Vincent and Pulitzer is like holding him hostage telling him to pretend like he's peeing in the corner almost looking at toilet it's like a constant thing really was a lot of that in that chapter there was a lot like next time you rewatch star us crusaders like keep an eye out for all these toilet nightmare scenes because it's like consistent I mean it's a travel log you know the story's a travel log so it's like when you go around the world you're going to see a lot of different kinds of toilets, you know? Yeah. Wasn't there something in Golden Wind where they do a toilet?

Like, they hide, like, treasure in a toilet. Yeah. Well, also, and they, they, uh, give Jojo a cup of pee. Oh, God. That's the best one. Yeah. And he turns into a jellyfish. He puts the chin in it.

He turns his tooth into a jellyfish and he fucking hides pee in it. See, this is why I'm a golden wind defender and like, think it's the best because that's, because you're like, I didn't know you could do that. And they all. thought it was cool. Everyone who was pranking him thought like, wow, cool. That guy just totally drank piss. He's so cool. He drank

piss and he didn't have to actually do it by turning his tooth into a jellyfish. This is like, it's the widest swings. It's the widest, most bullshit's part of the whole comic. It's so good. All right. Stepping back to non-piss-related takes.

What I do, I do think it's interesting about this game because it is, it's an RPG, it's turn-based combat, but But they have a lot of weird stuff because they really want you to, like, think about the manga and evoke the ideas of the manga. So all your characters have HP and MP. MP is mental points. And if either stat hits zero, you're out.

Obviously, if you fight, you know, you take off HP, but you can taunt. And enemies can taunt you, and that affects your MP. Oh, interesting. So I guess, you know, if you walk into the fight and, you know, I guess if Dio gets there in Dio, I was like, oh, you're approaching me, you know, like, he can, like, taunt you and, like, you know, psych you out and basically and reduce your MP. But you can also encourage your teammates

and buff their MP. And if your MP goes up, you deal more damage when you attack. But what's also really interesting is that in just but every battle, you can investigate, Shuraburu, and if you investigate,

you basically pass your turn in combat, but you unlock new options. And one of them is, one of them is just like a double down, like double damage. In Japanese, it's actually just his guts, which just does more damage. Cool. Yeah, it's like Tension and Dragon Quest. Yeah. But the other option, in Japanese,

is Hiramiki, which is kind of like a flash or a notion. I think the fan translation calls it idea. Yes. And basically, what that does is it will, depending on the situation, it will unlock something special. And one of the examples I found was, you know, early on in the manga when Jotoro goes to the school's nurse's office and Kakuin attacks him in the nurse's body with the pen. You know, it plays out like a, like a fight scene. But if you as Jotro use the investigate and you use the hiramiki, you will use Star Platinum and pull hyrophant green out of the nurse, and then the fight over, she just collapses. And then you fight Kakuin. But otherwise, I guess you'll just, you just beat the nurse up. I don't know what

happens if you just fight the nurse and beat her up. I don't know if that, if you have to do the Hiramiki, I have not played the game, unfortunately. Bad ending. Maybe, you know, it's unjust. Unjust to beat that poor woman to death. Yeah. She didn't do nothing. She got possessed. But yeah, throughout the game, there's little moments like that where you sort of, you don't, the best way to beat the game isn't necessarily just attack all the time.

You do want to plan things out and think about other strategies, which I think is very appropriate. Unfortunately, I think just because of the way it was, because, you know, technology at the time and the fact that they really wanted to get all this game into, you know, they probably had memory. I'm sure memory was a constraint. They had to rewrite and reshuffle things around and change a lot of. of details. A lot of characters are just hanging around Japan for some reason at this point. I know one of my favorites is that at one point they go to a weird house and they start investigating the weird house and they find deep blue moon like hanging out in the basement,

which normally like, you know, was the stand they fought in the ocean who like, you know, took the weird sea captain. Like that's all gone. Now he's just a guy in a flooded basement. And it turns out the mansion itself is strength, which, you know, you know, the manchin itself is strength, which, you know, was the orangutang, you know, big boat stand in the original. Now it's just a big house. That's a big downgrade.

Yeah, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't work. It was weirder when it was a monkey. Yeah. And then like, then when they're also a captain, I forget. I remember the monkey being dressed up in a specific way. He did. He dressed up in. You're thinking of NFTs.

God, I hope never to think of NFTs. Jotro punched all my apes. All my apes are, all my apes are retired. Orra, or I'd all my apes. More like muda, muda, muda. Me Fallon being like so, yeah. Yeah, I was schooling around in this long play, and I was like, wait a minute, that's not when the tower shows up.

The tower is in the plane, but it shows up in like a school hallway. And I was like, wait, so if the scary bug is in the school, who's in the plane? And I go to the plane and it's, oh, who was it? Crap, I forgot. Death 13 is on the plane And Midler is a flight attendant on the plane So you fight her It's yeah it's everything's like shuffled around

Oh you fight her the person I think so Not her stand Well she's got the she's got the Sheepcheting stand So you probably Yeah so it's translating the The submarine into an airplane

Just kind of condensing them So I think yeah That manages to kind of maintain the same Death 13 was in the desert too So they're just kind of like putting, taking settings and taking stands and kind of scrambling each into the other one at random intervals. Yeah, I think they kind of looked at the nature of the stands and said, which ones can we afford to move around? I mean, Death 13, they don't really fight in real life.

It's within the dreamscape. So, you know, that could be anywhere, really. So I think some of the changes make sense. But the way this is really based so carefully, like so, you know, for the most part. So faithfully around the manga is one of the weaknesses because really your only fights are the ones that you see in the manga. So you're always facing off basically against a boss level character. There are no minor enemies to sort of hone your abilities against, which you know, that could be good or bad. But it almost feels to me like somewhere between a visual novel and an RPG. Like it's kind of both-ish, you know, like radical dreamers or something along those lines, kind of stretching across two different genres and combining

them, which, you know, if you like those genres, that's pretty cool. If you don't, then, oh, well. But one of the weirdest changes, I think, is that because the game is just, you know, it's just an RPG-style combat game. So if you get lucky, or if you do things really, really well, you can reach the end and everyone just lives, which is a big departure from the original story, you know. So there's no scripted like, you know, Iggy, Iggy goes away or, you know, Kakuing gets ambushed by Dio. That doesn't happen.

Spoiler. You can get to the end and you can swim. So. I like the idea of, of, of, of, somebody getting to like part two of this, of this two part thing and being like, oh, man, you need, you spoiled. You spoiled part of the really early part of the series. Come on. It's only been around for 30 years.

I haven't had a chance to catch up. All right, anything more about this one, or shall we move on to the next blockbuster? I guess we can move on. The peak of the series debatable. Okay. Yes. Well, no, before that, before the peak, the mini-peak, we got to throw in one more reference to Cult Jump. And Jeremy, I'm so sad to hear you're going to skip this one, and Game Boy Works, because it's a 1993 Japanese-only Shonen Jump All-Stars game. Featuring lots of Stardist Crusades characters and Diamond and Brickable characters.

And it kind of looks like a Zelda game, but it's actually a trivia contest. Woo! Oh, what am I missing out on? What? You walk around a big, big mansion, and you find people, and instead of fighting them, they ask you questions about Shonen Jump manga and, you know, like how many heroes are in this game and, you know, how many, how many training decisions to take to overcome this bad guy and just the worst possible questions to ask. Can't believe I'm missing out on this one. God, what a bummer. It's just testing your loyalty to the brand. Yeah, right. No, no fan tries for this one.

for some inexplicable reason. Yeah, imagine that. They've left up the old trivia, the old trivia gang bang. I would like keep expecting there to be like an obtuse like go or showgi or mahjong game like a Jojo mahjong game we never got that. Oh, it'd be like Darby's Mahjong adventure or something. That's,

this is my favorite thing about like downloading like ROM sets illegally. Spoiler to the main mister is like when you're like, Oh, wow, this looks really cool. What, oh, Mahjong. Oh, no. This is my favorite sensation is just like, oh, that's a Mahjong game. Well, Chris, it's actually, it's not a digital game, but a physical game. I don't know how familiar everyone is, but here in Japan there's a game called Kharuta, which is sort of like, it's a lot of memorization.

It's sort of like based on classical poems or famous sayings, and they lay out a bunch of cards in the ground, and someone reads a card, and it's like the beginning of a phrase or a quote. quote, and you, the player, have to find the matching card to the ground and slap it as fast as possible, and then you, like, you read it out loud and then you get a point or whatever. And because Jojo is so well known for its weird and, you know, notable dialogue, they have Jojo editions of Karata games. So, you know, big Japanese Jojo fans can play Karata with, you know, famous jojo quotes, you know, so someone, you know, like the quote I opened with the show is, you know, you thought it was, you know, you thought it was, you know. You thought your first kiss could be Jonathan, but it was me, Dio? Like, that's, that's got to be a card. That's got to be a card setting there, you know? I'm sure somewhere in there you've got the...

If I don't get closer, I can't kick your ass or whatever. Yeah, yeah, you made one mistake. You pissed me off or, you know, of course, Rohans, you know, Dagakotawar, like that kind of stuff. Like, they've got, it's, you know, it's not a game you can download. It's just, it's a card game you can buy in a store. I don't... It's probably out of print, but it's also a Jojo thing, so there's probably versions of it on Yahoo auctions or whatever.

So there are specific weird little Jojo games out there, just not that kind of thing. But who knows? There could very well be a Jojo chess set out there. I don't know. Why not? Wasn't there? So this is something I'm trying to figure out was like there was a like not all of the major arcana, but like there was a tarot.

There were tarot cards put out at one point for Jojo. And I was like, is it a full deck? Because if so, that would just be my default tarot deck. I heard about this recently. And like someone in like a discord or something was bringing this up. And I was like, yo, that's so cool. Because it came with like their collector's edition, like box set something or other. But it only came with like two cards.

So it's like I don't know how you're supposed to collect them. But they're not actually tarot card shaped. They're like playing card shaped or something. And I was like, what is the point? I think also this also came up because there's a Gundam Wing tarot deck, which looks cool. but I also think may have a similar issue of the concept of a tarot deck is cool, but nobody actually makes like a full, maybe that one. Oh, it's funny because I looked up Gundam Wing tarot deck and it's like my, I posted about it.

And that's the first, it's like the third Google research is me being like, is it good? Yeah, I don't know. I think somebody on like Amazon bootleg did or something might buy that bootleg because it looks tight. Yeah, I mean, as far as the tarot illustrations go, I think Iraqi only did, like, the major arcana for Stardist Crusaders. I don't even know if he did all the cards or not. And I don't know if they all appear, or if some of them, maybe some of them are, like, mentioned but actually shown. I know he's created illustrations for certain, you know, giveaways and pack-ins. I don't think there's ever been an official, officially licensed Jojo's tarot deck.

but I'm sure fans have probably created them and made them and, you know, crafted them. But I don't think there's ever been an official, like, here you go. Because otherwise, yeah, that would sell out, you know, in minutes. Yeah. I'm looking at this, like, bootleg on Amazon that cost $10. And it's like all of the major arcana and then all of like the Egyptian arcana and then none of that. Yeah, anyway, sorry. None.

It's just something I want him to like, someone to sit him down with and be like, could you just do this for real? I need to know who the Ace of Wands and Jojo is. Yeah. Actually, one of the, one of the merchandise I bought when I was at, when they had the big Jojo event at USJ here for the 20th, no, 30th anniversary in 2017, I got a little throw pillow and one side of the throw pillow is the stand illustration, sorry, the star illustration, and the other side is the world. And it's just a little throw pillow. It's just a cute little thing. And we just, yeah, I just have it on my couch. It's a nice one.

Lovely. Yeah. I could have bought an authentic Jotoro, my hat is also my hair cap, but I... They were selling that at USJ? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So cool. That rules.

God damn it, that rules. Oh, man, I wish we could talk about the limited time, like, rides that they had at USJ for, like, various events. Oh, yeah. Permanent, were they? No, no, it was just, it was that summer for 2017. They had, it was less of a ride. It was more of, like, a theatrical.

You basically, you went in this theater and the seats were all like, you know, kind of like the 4D experience where like the seats could move a little bit. You could spray some water. You're all wearing 3D glasses. And all summer long, it was basically kind of a double header. Like, during the day, they would show a Dragon Ball movie. And then after a certain point, it would switch to the Jojo movie. And so when I went there to experience it, I basically hung out there all day. And I kept going back there because I wanted to see both.

And, you know, it was basically, they were both kind of 3D-ish, 3D-ish animation, but they tried to resemble the cartoons at the time, but they definitely had to use, like, polygons. And it was, it was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed how, at least in the case of the Jojo one, they basically recreated the Jotro-Dio standoff at the very end of the show. But they, they came with a weird narrative plot excuse. Like, oh, you're not watching it as one of them. You're watching it as a member of the Speedwagon Foundation until you're observing this fight. Yes. I remember reading about this weird caveat.

And I was like, oh, what kind of is this a ride or is this a show? Because it's like, I was under the impression that you were in basically like it was like a projected like theater sort of experience. But you're in like a car or something. No, no, just sitting in a seat. Like back to the future, the ride or something like that. No, it was just like a regular theater. There was no ride aspect. That's why I was like, how could they make a temporary ride?

That's too much money, Shirley. No. I think we're strange as far, but I do. USA does have a dedicated, like, black ride that's a VR ride. And I think every year or so, they basically make a new movie for it, but the ride itself doesn't actually change. Okay. I'm crossing my streams there. Yeah.

But, like, so in that case, like, one year it was Final Fantasy. And I wrote that ride and, like, so while I'm going up and down in this thing, I'm wearing goggles, and all I'm seeing are just beautiful Final Fantasy characters and crystals and Chocobo and all that stuff. I'm so jealous. So cool. So jealous. All right, let's go back and let's talk about what might be the main event of this episode because I think it's probably the one that we've all played the most. And yes, the original title was Jojo's Bazaar Adventure.

In certain territories, it was called Jojo's Venture. They also released a updated version which added the subtitle Heritage for the Future. And this was The Fighting Game, originally debuting in 1998, 1998 in arcades. And then it came to PlayStation 1 and Dreamcasts in 1999 and later in 2000. And against all odds, this, I'm pretty sure this is the first officially localized English Jojo of any format because the cartoons did not come over. The manga was not translated to English at this point. So people in America would just get this game and it's like, what the hell is this fighting game?

And it, but it came here. And it was running on CPS3. You know, this was the, this was the hottest action that Capcom could deliver. Because honestly, if you look at this game, at times, you've basically got four different characters in the screen, and they're all exquisitely animated. So I think they had to go up. Like, they had to use their hottest arcade hardware at the time to sort of like, you know, get everything in there. And that will soon be coming to eventually, mister, I hope, when they get that CPS3 hardware working. Yeah, there were only really two games on CPS3 hardware that weren't Street Fighter 3.

there was Red Earth and then there was Jojo. So that's it. This is like in a rare kind of, you know, exalted class of 2D action fighting games. It is, it is really just a,

those are good games. It's just like, it's like, it's like, that's really all you're doing with the CVS3 is just like, man, you just, I really need to play, place your fighter free. It's just,

it's I really super need to play third strike. So like, I'm not a person that like gives any sort of a crap about fighting games or beat them up. or anything like that. But, like, I can appreciate, like, just how pretty this game is. Like, the sprite work is ridiculous. The backgrounds are ridiculously gorgeous. The animations, like, everyone's, like, heaving. Like, everyone's breathing with their whole damn body. It's, like, so extra. Like, everything is just so, so detailed and super gorgeous. And the stand element,

where they're doing so much of the fighting for you, not only makes this a very strange game to play and kind of wrap your head around, but also really opens up just all kinds of graphical elements. Like, like I said earlier, every character in this game fights in a unique way and has stands that are, you know, stand powers that are taken straight from the manga. But, you know, they're all over the place. You have, obviously, like, the kind of straightforward color inversion for Dio and Jotaro's time stop. But then you have, like, whole horse being able to. cause this complex array of pipes

to appear and just like show up in the backgrounds. His bullets can ricochet around them and then hit your opponent in the head. You know, Kakioin has all kinds of powers based around green, herif and

greens, like web type powers and strings and that sort of thing. It's just, it's really for, I would say for fans of the series, for people who are familiar with the source material, it's really just a work of love, trying to render all these wild superpowers in as many varied and accurate ways as possible and creative ways that work within the context of a fighting game.

I'm like you, Jess. I don't really care that much about fighting games. I'm not any good at them. And I would love to see a game with this level of fidelity and just referentialism to JoJo and this level of graphical quality in a different format altogether because it's just, it's a visual treat to look at and a joy to watch people who know what they're doing play. And also really frustrating if you don't know what you're doing and get demolished by enemies doing strange things that you couldn't have predicted, which is, you know, very much the Joe. Joe Way. Absolutely. I'm realizing now something that I've not realized before looking at the cover. Again, the American cover is not very good versus the like Japanese covers, which are just beautiful art. It's a very close cropped image of Jotaro. And I think I realized, I think I thought he looked like Dick Tracy or something like that. Like he was wearing a cold hat because you can only see the rim and stuff like that. So I was like, oh, he's wearing a yellow. Is he a detective? Is he Dick Tracy? But one thing I also wanted to get to was that, yeah, this game looks really good because it's like, right smack dab in the center of like Capcom going full. This is the best era that like sweet spot.

Like, because I, you know, the second I got my mister, I started playing like dark stockers constantly because that was the first thing. I was like, I need to be able to like play this and have it look like it does in the arcade. And when you have it in your house, it's like life changing. You know what I mean? To be like, oh, God, this is looks too good. But like this is also a game that looks that not as good as dark stalkers because very few things do.

but it's in that same era, that same just like, oh, man, this is probably as good as Price's look, you know, like. Right, yeah. You know what I mean? I also just, I love watching these characters walk. These are the best walk cycles in the biz. They're so good. It's, it's that, it's that like weird, you know, third strike era.

Just like, well, what if we, what if we made characters just walk in ways that people have never walked before? It's like all super high fashion, which completely. goes with Jojo stuff. So it's just gorgeous. Yeah, it kind of seems like a reaction to motion capture. Like, yes, we could have realistic walks and they could be very detailed, elaborate, rotoscoped walk cycles. But why would we do that when we have the ability to do something that's smooth and elaborate that's also totally bizarre and distinctive and makes every character unique to look at and to watch on screen? So you can immediately tell which character you're playing

as because they have different poses and different ways of walking. I also think that, like, this is when you can tell people are starting to have fun developing these games. Like, you know, I don't know about the first RPG doesn't seem like that way. Maybe they did have fun. But this is the one where it's like, all right, we have this comic, we have this manga. How do you make that look? How do you, how do you get the physics, the, the biomechanics of Iraqi drawing a person into, like,

motion? You know what I mean? Into a game. and like the challenge is wild and like you see that in extended into like even current games you know what I mean where they're they're like trying to like do a one to one loyal representation of not just that but also the anime sorry I was just watching the long play where Dio drops the steamroller on so good also also you got shadow Dio punches everything while he's doing it too but yes shadow Dio is in this and he's completely overpowered I hear yeah there's like another like secret character too. I forget who it is. Oh, there's tons of secret characters. Some of them are just sort of simple pallet swaps, but a lot of them just have alternate versions.

One of the funny things, aspects, is, you know, you've got old Joseph in there, but there's also Young Joseph. Oh, yes, there's a pallet swap. Yeah. And Young Joseph doesn't have a stand, so he fights with, you know, the weapons and hormone power. Yeah, instead of a stand, he has the clacker balls.

Exactly. So good. And what's really wild is, you know, one of the playable characters is Alessie, who we didn't really talk about last time. Oh, God. For a reason. Yeah.

For a good reason. Alessi's whole deal is that his stand deages you, and he really likes killing children. So in this game, if he hits you with a stand power, every character has a young version of themselves they revert to. So if you hit old man, Joseph, with the power, he becomes young adult Joseph, and he can still kick your ass. I'm glad that at least the fighting game realized the incredible potential that a rocky ignored in that plot. I'm trying to think of this predates Babalities I don't think it did

No Mortal Kombat 2 was 93 Or 93 so Oh yeah yeah yeah sorry I completely got the chronology of they're wrong But yeah It's basically the only other instance of a babality But done from a completely different context And yet this is a series that actually has a baby enemy

But death when you fight death 13 is a secret boss character The baby's nowhere to be seen You fight the stand and that's it. So you cannot punch the baby. Or feed the baby poop. I wonder if there was some sort of like censorship reason or something. Like you can punch the dog like crazy. I don't think censors were paying attention to this game.

I don't think anybody was aside from like weird weird weaves and stuff. You know, like maybe I just imagine like some internal meeting where they were like, okay, obviously we have to be able to beat up the dog. But can we get away with beating up a baby? I don't know. Does anyone want to beat up a baby aside from a lessee? I mean, like, that doesn't put you in good company, so it's probably just as well. I do want to mention, so this game has a, you know, a broad selection of characters from all over Starters Crusaders, and yeah, they've tried to put all these characters together.

Some of them have regular stands. Some of them have special stands. You know, Whole Horse has a gun. They got both the sword guys in there, so you get a sword guy. You got the bird, pet shop, you got the dog, Iggy. one of the unique characters is Midler because Midler in the comic is just you never see her. She's unseen. She gets pulverized before you get to see her normally. And like the first time you see her, she's like a beat up fucking corpse with her face caved in. So no one had any idea what she looked like. Yeah, you don't actually even see the corpse. Do you just like

from, you know, from a distance you see or maybe in the manga it's different, but in the anime, you just, like, see the body kind of from a distance, and people go up and look at it and they're like, oh, my God. Yeah, exactly. She's never, she's never really on screen. So because they wanted to put her in the game, allegedly they talked to Araki, and Araki's like, okay, sure, I'll design your new character. And, you know, for a guy who's so into fashion, he didn't give her any clothes. She's basically like a, like a veiled fortune teller type, who's got, like a bikini top and like uh like a princess lea kind of thing and like some like a little shawl over her head and she's i i'll give you know i'll give them this they definitely

she's constantly moving she's constantly moving and bopping and like undulating yeah like exquisite animation she's also doing like the exact same pose as um yukako yama ga yamagishi from oh good point yeah if you like look it up like she's got like a lot of the same, like, I think he just was like, well, I'm designing this anyway, so. But, um, I, you know, I do love her weird little poe. Like, there's, there's the illustration of her from the side where she has, like, the veil and the stars. And, like, it's her just sort of in a squat. Yeah, she's kind of doing the bancho squat, even though she's a lady. But, but, but in, like, in the coolest pumps. So this is the, this is a total Iraqi moment. Like, look up Midler's,

like, actual, like, illustration. Yeah, these heels are formidable. Oh, God. That's so. pumped her a dick. This is why he's a fucking goat. He's like, he'll do something. He's like, that lady is naked, and she's serving. It's just like, it's like, it's like, you're like, I can't stay mad at you. It can't serve to you. Always be serving. Yeah. So tight. He's so cool.

I love him. Even when he does shit like this. The game's so good, though. I don't know, like, it's not a, it's not terribly well balanced, if I remember correctly. Like none of these games are. Oh, no, no. Oh my goodness. It's like a legendarily badly balanced. if I remember correctly, but I'm also not the

biggest, like, guy who gets into like, you know, what, which, anyway. The game has, has, you know, fans to this day. There's still tournaments to this day. And if you have a tournament, there's a good chance to patch up is just banned because not only is he a tiny bird character who's hard to hit, but all his

moves chained to the moves and, like, he can do crazy combos that kill characters. Also, Kakuin is the same way because Kakuin has range and projectiles and the giant net move that stuns you, like it's, yeah, these, these characters are, like two or three characters can easily dominate every other character in the game, and other characters are

very slow and hard to use, but of course, there are ways to beat everybody with everybody else, but yeah, it's not really, it's not really a balanced game, but because of the property and because it just, it looks so goddamn good, I still see tournaments on YouTube and Twitch to this day. People are still playing it. It was, besides the ports, which we'll get to a minute, this game was brought back in an HD remaster in 2012 to the then current consoles of Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. They were both based on the Dreamcast version. They added online play.

They looked great. And two years later, they're just listed, delisted so you can't play them again. So, sorry. I love our future. It's so good. Great. This is why you have to, like, de-do-you. Like, I had a friend who was, like, mad because he accidentally updated his PS-4's

firmware. He's like, oh, God damn it. There's just a bunch of... And now we can't play, like, you know, Bloodbore in the correct way. Because I won't be able to put, like, the weird, like, two lines of code needed to make it run at 60. But, yeah, I don't know. It's... I hate the future.

It's bad. But we should mention the home ports, because they weren't interesting. In the case of the Dreamcast version, they took both the original version of the arcade game and the sort of revised version and sold them together. So you can basically choose whether you want to play. It's almost like if you included a Street Fighter 2 and a champion engine, like if you wanted to pick, depending which one you'll pick. The PlayStation version, however, is based on the first game but uses characters from the second game. But they also added the Super Story Mode.

And Chris, you were saying you played a lot of this release, really. Do you want to talk about Super Story Mode at all? No, I'm just saying I played it recently because it was the only version that I could play on My Mister because they haven't ported CPS3 for However. I would play more of, I think, like All-Star Battle a little bit, but like not, but not a terrible lot. But I don't know. I guess the thing that's interesting about this is that there's like properties where

you're like, okay, you're making a real ass game and then properties where, and we can get into this a little bit with like, All-Star Battle R and All-Star Battle where it's like, oh, you're just having fun. And like, this is the most like real ass the game gets. And then everything else is like, oh, you're having fun. You know what I mean? But like, um, like jump force shit or like the Naruto games, the Naruto games, you know, like, uh, there's a certain quality of Bandai games, particularly when Bandai, like Namco Bandai does that stuff where it's like, oh, it's just like, you're just having fun with all your favorite characters. The whole gang's here.

But yeah, no, it's, it's, I don't know. It's a, it's a cool looking game. I like the, the, the, you can talk more about the, the plot, uh, stuff, but I, I mainly just play it to like, do supers and stuff and stuff and have a, look cool. Well, right, except what the super story mode is in the PlayStation 1 version is they've, besides the regular fighting game, they have all these sort of like miniature versions or like side games and mini games you can play that are based on stuff that happens in the manga. So, for example, like, at one point you, when you fight against, like, when they meet Steely Dan and they have the lovers, you control one of two characters and you basically

have to go inside Joseph's brain and it's kind of like a shot. shooter version, like you're fighting like little Stan monsters inside of Joseph's head. Awesome. All versions, including the arcade version, actually. This is not unique to Super Story Mode, but they always have a dedicated stage where you fight

Indul, the water guy. And because the whole gimmick of Indul is he's just a guy, you always get to basically run through a sort of like, almost like a platforming stage, dodging his water attacks to get to the end of the stage where he's standing there and then one hit and you

beat him. But you have to navigate past all his, you know, claws coming out of the ground and damaging rain. Like, you have to do all this sort of jumping and rolling and dodging to get to him and then just beat him in one hit. This is why I want, like, a Jojo game that isn't a term-based RPG or a fighting game. It seems like that's the two genres Jojo's is allowed to be, basically. And it's like, I feel like there's, like, other areas that, the other genres that the series could be in. And, like, no one's given it like a good go, maybe we'll get to a later game and I'll be proven wrong, though. Damn, I never actually, yeah, I guess I never, I guess I sort of assumed that like it was just like,

oh, this is just going to be a story mode. I don't need to play it. But yeah, looking at like, this is like our type. It's wild. They just threw this in here. That's so cool. I love when you throw a different kind of game in your other game, you know, like, all right, here we're going to do Panzer Dragoon in here. Keep people on their toes. As long as you don't do that in the final boss battle, that's always BS. Like, you know, Metal Gear Solid 4. Now it's a fighting game at the very end. Have fun. I love that part. That was wild, though. Trash. I hated it, but I was like, God damn it, Kojima, you just shine on, you crazy diamond.

Yeah, that's one of those things where it's like, you know, you shouldn't have to review that. But like, at home, I had a blast. I did. I know. I'm sorry. That's okay. I lived. Metal Gear didn't. Let's jump to the next game, which unfortunately never came, never left Japan, although they did show it off at E3, 2002, and they showed it with an English title, but in the end, I guess either it didn't sell, or it didn't sell, or The license didn't go through. I don't know what happened. But a Capcom-based

Jojo's Bazaar Adventure all all based around Part 5. So it's Golden Win, Vento Oreo. Yeah. And I got to say, yes, it is a 3D game, so you have, you know, you got polygons, not sprites.

But I must say, for a 2002 PlayStation 2 game, it looks so good. Dude. This looks amazing. It's so good. For 2002? Oh, my God.

This is the secret heater of the, of the, entire series because it's just like it's like up there with like jet set radio in terms of like fuck this still looks great yeah i mean i'm wondering the footage that you captured or not captured but shared with us is this actually on ps2 or is it done with an emulator that upscales and up ress things because it just looks too clean to be ps2 i think a lot of people it looks like pcx too okay i think a lot of people do do like upreses of them You know what I mean?

Like, because, but it's, the thing about it is you're patching the game anyway, man. You know, like if you're doing an English patch of the game, you're probably already, like, got retroarch open. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, I'm just, I'm just thinking, like, had it been released contemporarily, it would not have looked this good. You could, you could release this game as is today. And people would be like, that's a cool looking game. Like, people would be really into it even now with the style. It looks like, you know, my wish.

sort of came true, from what I said earlier, because this is not quite a fighting game. This is more like cutscenes with boss fights in between, but the boss fights look a little more like puzzle-based sort of boss fights, which I think is, you know, accurate to the Jojo experience is because there's always like an aha, here's the gimmick, here's the secret, or I meant to be, you know, getting my ass kicked, actually, because I have a secret plan. So, like, you know, I'm looking at like, you know, the Black Sabbath fight and it's like, oh, you have to lure him out of your shadow and by dodging at the right moment

and stuff like that. And it's like, this makes a lot more sense and is more fun for me than turn-based battles or, you know, just like beat him up, E Fight him games. It reminds me of, look I said. Oh, I was just going to say, I feel like it's

as cool as it is for us looking at it with, you know, the wisdom of having experienced Jojo in its entirety. This must have been just utterly incomprehensible. for Americans in 2002. I can see why this didn't make it over here because it really relies heavily on familiarity with the source text because it is so closely tied to the narrative beats of the manga. So yeah, I can understand why it didn't make it over, but it does seem like

a real shame. Like this would have had this been localized and, you know, most of us would have not really paid attention to it back at the time. It would have been such a great thing to go back an experience like, oh, now I've seen the show. You know, I've read a bunch of the manga localizations. Now I can play this, you know, 20 years later and really appreciate it. Yeah. And it would have, it definitely probably was the correct move to like not do this because there's like no audience, basically. You know what I mean? Even then, like we forget how, how dire the anime situation was then where it's like only when Tunami got like the rights of Dragon Ball did stuff start popping off. you know what I mean like uh in like wide acceptable release but like imagine being the person

who gets this and you're like you have to like invent a lore in your head around like why is why is she in a plane fighting a bunch of pink goo you know like golden wind i feel like is such a weird arc for me at least like it's like so much like body horror in it i don't know I think it might be like the weirdest, quirkiest one for me. It's the one with the most bullshit, and that's why I respect it. Yeah. But I mean, the villain's power really is difficult to depict in the, like, I feel like Iraqi struggled with it in the manga, the anime struggled with it.

It's so abstract, so abstruse. Like, how do you translate that into a video game? Like, you make a move and the enemy dodges, basically. that's that's kind of how it seems to translate but you know so much of of what makes king crimson's power or sorry emperor crimson's power's work is that you're you're witnessing him actually like viewing the different timelines and avoiding them i mean i guess now that we've all seen avengers we're like oh it's like dr strange looking at the timelines but like how how do you turn that into an action video game that's tough so yeah like i actually may

managed to, like, scroll to the Bruno versus King Crimson fight, and it's, like, just a timed, like, survive as long as possible sort of thing, where it just looks like you are getting teleported and fucked around with, like, constantly. Like, the guy is just teleporting. This is just unfair. All you can do is kind of run around. And then, uh, you get punched through your entire body and you get an E rank anyway or something like that. Yeah, I was going to say, the great thing about that one is that you don't, canonically, you don't have to survive that fight. So it's all right. I honestly, everyone talks about, like, King Crimson and not being easy to understand.

I think it's very simple to me personally. I actually think gold. Granging us over here. I'm huge. It's great. Trainus, sense. Teach us. No, I'm saying the, the thing I will say is that Gold Experience Requiem is a weirder ability to

me. I don't know. Oh, yeah. That's also a total mess that I don't understand. That one is, like, so cool. It's like, oh, okay, you're just like in an infinite feedback loop where, like, you can't do you can never win. Basically, it's the I win button. And, uh, it's really cool. But yeah, no, this game looks so good still. And it's like really loyal, really loyal to this, uh, source

material. I got to like play this because I was just straight up like not like aware that there was an English patch for it until like now. And it's like, oh shit, this changes everything. It's pretty recent. It's, it's pretty recent, uh, as translations go. Um, yeah, one of the things I really enjoy about this game is that you know you have you get like these story chunks then you get the fights and you get stories you get fights and when you're in the fights you get like these bonus with a they call secret factors and every fight has has a certain number of secret factors and usually it's tied to like doing something that's from the manga you know and like one the examples like if you when you fight the grateful dead on the train if you break the ice machine

then your character reacts oh your character reacts to having the ice and like you get like bonus points and, like, you get, like, extra lifer or something. So the game sort of throw these little mechanics in there to sort of encourage you. It's, like, rewards fans for doing stuff that's in the, in the original material. And it also rewards, you know, replayability. Because, like, okay, I need to go back and play the state fight again and try to get all the secret factors. Speaking of replayability, once the game is finished, you unlock something called another story mode, which lets you play lots of different fights with almost any character you want.

so then you can just have like weird dream matches you know um like you can you can play as polner in the wheelchair and get your vengeance on you know diabolo you know you can have the gangster boys fight each other uh chariots requiem is prayable you can be chariot requiem just walk around real slow like if you want to do that what is that what is that that storyline even about are you just trying to turn everyone into uh the the the evolution forms or whatever no it's just sort of like, you know, and there's another game that does this too, but to me, I view it as like the Guardian Heroes Arena mode, which like, we made these characters, they're all in the game, why don't you have some fun with them, you know, just do what you want with them.

So that's, that's what I view it. Have a good time. It really is the whole point of these games. It's just like, you just have a good time, guys. So, since we mentioned, like, it was probably an hour ago now, but I do want to point out, so between the Capcom fighting game in 98 and this 3D game in 2002, you have a lot of audio content for these Jojo characters, and some Japanese fan, about 20 years ago, the dates point to 2003, made a flash animation called Muda, just called Muda, and all the sound effects come

from these two Capcom games, and there's not much to it. All you do is the drop-down menu, you pick one of the five characters, and you get a little stick-figure animation, and they're all Jojo characters. Mm-hmm. And you got, you know, you got Jotoro, you got Jorno, you've got Bucilati, you've got Narancha, and, of course, you have Dio with the world. And somehow this flash animation was, you know, it got on the internet, it got passed around the internet, and somehow it reached the English-speaking world, even though

it's all in Japanese. And this was like the first big Jojo meme, I think, that entered the English-speaking world because it may, if you don't know what it is, it makes no, like, if you didn't play the fighting game and, You didn't, you see a, you know, a stick figure who frees his time, throws a bunch of knives, flies up the screen, and comes down with a steamroller. And this just became, you know, the biggest, it just became this sort of online humor, sort of like a non-sequitur thing. And I remember having to explain to people like, oh, yeah, this is from, but of course, at the time, I didn't know about the PlayStation 2 game. So three-fifths of the things that are in this animation, I don't know what they are.

You know, I don't know what, I don't know who Giorno is. I don't know who Bertrati is. I only know the two elements of the other game. So even then it confused me, you know, when I first saw it. I've seen this flash animation, but without sound. So I've just seen the artwork. And it never occurred to me that, oh, yeah, those stick figures, that was all Jojo stuff. Dang.

Okay. Now I need to find that. It's like when you figure out where the dancing baby's from. It's from a car commercial. Or it's from another stuff. No, it appeared in a car commercial, but whatever. It's fine. It's complicated. All right. Well, we're running a little long, so we'll skip some of the jump games because they don't really matter. And we'll jump to the next place or two game, which unfortunately was Japanese only again. Releasing 2006, it was very closely related to the 20th anniversary of Jojo. And it's a game all about Phantom Blood. But Capcom didn't do this one. It was a Bandai. It was Bondi game. But it is very similar to Capcom's game in that you've got long cutscenes. You've got lots of.

of dialogue, and then you have a 3D arena fight where you play out some battle from the original story. But unfortunately, unfortunately, it does not look nearly as good. It looks all muddy and brown and gray. This game, you know, considering it's four years later, and it's like a late PS2 game, it looks terrible. I don't know. It's really bad looking.

Yeah, I mean, the animations are really dire, too. Like, I'm watching Jonathan. Dyer? Dyer. I'm watching Jonathan run around this arena and he runs like a robot sort of like there's no finesse there's no like he's not putting his whole pussy into it like all the other characters are from the previous games where they're vogueing all over the place but I wonder if like some of the style problems is not like not like problems but I wonder if some of the style like issues is because like I don't know Phantom Blood is just like not as stylistically interesting as the later ones because it was kind of more of like a fist of the North Star sort of vibe to it, more like typical like Shonen, beefy guy situation. But I don't know. I mean, this, this game came out six years after the bouncer on the same hardware and looks infinitely worse. That's just, that's kind of embarrassing.

That was, that was launch hardware. Yeah, sure, it was a disaster of a game, but the bouncer has style. Come on, you got to at least aspire to what people were doing at launch. Come on. This, this game looks like if you sell shaded sort of a berserk. Yeah, a little. Does not look good. But there is sort of a fun factor that, much like the Golden Win game, if you beat it, you unlock a sort of like grab bag of like any character in the game, go ahead, pick them, you can play as them. It doesn't matter if they're too strong. It doesn't matter if they're too weak.

You can play the game. You can play matches as speed wagon. You can play them as a zombie. You can play them. I think you can even play as like an undid cop, like all the characters who are in the game. Can you play Danny? oh geez can you play the dog i don't know i know tom petty's playable you can be tom petty give danny his justice like even yeah all the all the side characters who get like you know like dire who just show up and die

you can play the game as dire if you want to play his dire you know like go right ahead do they have like special different movesets or is it just like a palette like a like a model swap or something they have like profile pictures and they have like a little menu that lists all their moves so i don't I don't know how many animations they share, but they, like, they put all the stuff in the game. They wanted people to mess around with them and just play, you know, play, because, you know, the actual story isn't that long. So I think the idea is, like, once you beat it, well, why don't you beat it again? Yeah, I guess so. But fans have translated it.

So if you do want to play this game, you can probably pick up a patch somewhere. It was never, never released in any of your field. And honestly, this was a weird time for Joja, because this comes around the same time as the doomed Phantom Blood animated film, which we didn't really talk about. last episode. It came out in early 2007, very close to the 20th anniversary. It released in Japanese theaters. It didn't play well. It didn't last long. And it was never released on home video. It has been erased from time like King Crimson. You cannot watch this movie. You cannot find this movie. It does not exist. Wow. Wow. You can find about 10 minutes of a workprint on YouTube if you look for it. But that's it's like it's got time codes on it. It is just. What was so

bad about it. Like, what? Huh? They tried to, as best I can understand, they tried to condense all of Phantom Blood into a single animated film. They chopped out a bunch of characters. They, it just didn't work. No one seems to like it. I think because it was released in theaters, they probably stuntcasted a lot of the, the voices, they have like celebrities do show up and like, that's never good. Wow. So, yeah, you can't watch it. Believe me, I'd love to see it and see what's, you know, what's wrong with it? Because, you know, the scraps that are there, it was, I think it was Madhouse or APPPP. Like, you know, they had, they had a quality studio behind it, but. Oh, God, I got to find this. Well, I'm looking up like, like, the Jojo's Bizarr Wiki and, like,

manga and film differences, one of the differences is speedwagon is omitted. Yeah. What do you mean? Speedwagon is also frightened. Yeah, he's gone. Yeah, no, that's probably, it's one of those ones where it's probably like, we can forget this happened. Nobody, nobody has to, nobody has to know, but I need to know now. It's like there's certain movies I have on my hard drive where it's like, I have this in case it, it disappears, like the movie music. It's just like, I need to like, I need to keep this just so the, I know where the body is buried. You know what I mean? Like, it's just some, it's like contraband. I need to have it now. It's so weird. Like the screenshots look rather nice. I'm so curious.

I'm sure it was animated pretty well. Yeah, the scraps that are there look great. But, yeah, it's become like a holy girl kind of thing. Every couple of years, someone finds, like, an old lobby card, and they scan it high-res, and they share it with the Internet. It's like, oh, more proof it existed. But, yeah, it's gone. It's gone. Wow. Fascinating.

All right, so let's go to the other big deal, which is Joe's Bar Adventure All-Star Battle, originally only for PlayStation 3 in 2013, and later released, again, for PlayStation 3 in 2013, and later released, again for PS4, and then re-released just recently as All-Star Battle are. And that's on all your PlayStation's, all your Xboxes, your

Steam, it's even on Switch. And this is a fascinating one for me because I was in the game press at the time, so I was there, I was at Namcoo Bandai, and I was there to see the Cyberkick guys show up and they're cosplay as Jojo characters. They remember they had a whole, their

office, they laid out all these art books and magazines and manga on the desk and it's like, we love Jojo. Look at all this Jojo stuff we have. And they really, you know, because again, this is 2013, the anime had just started. So, like, some of us in the room knew all about Jojo, but a lot of the people in the room still didn't know what Jojo was. Yeah. Diamond, was this one of the Tokyo Game Show meetings that they would have at Namco Bandai's headquarters? Yes, yes, yes. I don't remember that at all. And I always went to those. I was, I was there. I promise you. We saw, uh,

Peroshi, I don't remember what character he was dressed as, but he was fully dressed up and he was posing for all the, all the photographers. Yeah. Wow. Okay. I'm positive I was there because I remember seeing you at a bunch of those events and I would go to them every year. But, you know, I think I got spun so that I couldn't see anything out of the left side of my face and just totally ignored it. I mean, you know, you know how Toki Kim shows are. It can be a whirlwind of information and maybe you just, you missed that one. In any case, it is a 2D fighting game, but it's all done with 3D models, kind of like, you know, like a Street Fighter 4. So it's almost like a 2.5D. There's some limited motion to different planes. Yes. The original game had 41 characters, and they really went, at that point, they even went all the way from part one, all the way through part 8, although the only part 8 character is Sailor Boy, Joyce Gay, so that's it.

But they really have a broad range of fighters and different kinds of ideas. You've got Haman fighters, you've got vampires, you've got the horseback people from Steelball Run, you've got all the stand fighters, it's a, it's a real popery, it's a, it's a, they cast in it really wide and it's definitely much, it's, you know, as Chris said, like, these, they're having fun. They're loving it. They wanted you to, they wanted this for, to be for fans. Yeah. This is lovingly animated. You should play, no, it's on Game Pass. Just download it. Or the, the, the new version is on Game Pass right now. It's, You'll probably play it for like a handful of minutes and be like, okay, I get it, you know. And like I did see a bunch of people like labbing it like when it came out last year. Some people were just playing it on the switch and just doing like completely broken stuff, which is always fun. Also, you know who else is in this? Bow. Yeah. Yeah. Bow. Do you not know who bow is? I'm not sure I know who bow is. Oh, do you want to do you want to do, would you like to explain bow? Sure. Bao is easily the most popular Iraqi creation pre-Jojo. What? He was a manga car from his early 20s, and so he made a bunch of one-offs and some side stories. But Bao had a run for, you know, had got a few volumes. I think it was officially translated at one point. It got an anime adaptation that was officially licensed and released.

Pretty okay, actually. It's not a bad anime. It's like not great, but it's like cool looking. My friends and I watched it, you know, many years before we even knew what Jojo was. And we were, you know, it's, you know, it's appropriately disgusting at times. Yeah. It's got a lot of body stuff. Yeah, it's, it's wild. 1989 on the dot, bow the visitor. It's a real, you watch it all on YouTube because, like, obviously nobody cares.

Why has no one informed me of this? I guess the way you would describe it is, uh, what if Iraqi tried to do Geiver or like, oh, man, why has no one told me about that? I'm mad. It's not that long. You'll watch it in, like, uh, it's like a 50 minute OVA. Oh, yeah. And, like, it's pretty short.

It's pretty good, though. More reasons for me to be pissed off that no one has told me about this. But it's like, it's like, imagine if Jotaro turned into the stand and also the stand was wearing, like, pants and like a cool cut off. Like, it's really cool. And yeah. Yeah. And then people get their heads ripped off and stuff. It's really sick.

Nice. But, yeah, no, that's in there. I was playing the, the battle R is really fun, you know. It's just, it's a good time. That's all you got to know. It's, it's fun. They do, and I think in the more recent remake, they retconned in the current anime voice actors into it. So it's like by 2013, obviously, like, none of these people had really been in the series yet.

So when they redid it, they just re-recorded all of the voice actors or most of the voice actors doing lines. I think that's how that worked. Yeah, they've incorporated as many voice actors as they possibly can to sort of bring it in sync. because this is very much, even though it's manga style and all the characters when they attack, you know, they've got the Anamata Pia on the screen, it's still, it's made by Bandai. It's obviously tied to the animation, and All-Star, the R version is even more tied to the animation. So they try to have as many actors and character names and everything sync up as best they can. Yeah.

I do want to highlight one quick point, though, just because it's notable. So when the original game came out back to 2013, Famitsu gave it a 40 out of 40. They loved it. That's so funny. Wow. But fans were less happy because the PlayStation 3 game, which, you know, was, again, a retail release sold the store, you know, for probably $7,000, $8,000 or whatever. But it had a special campaign mode that you had to play to unlock lots of special, you know, colors and costumes. And this campaign mode was run like a gotcha game with microtransactions and energy meters and things that run out of lives.

And fans were incensed because, like, I just bought this. game and you're basically microtransectioning me? Like, what the fuck? Yeah, that's a good reason to be pissed off. That was extremely unpopular. And the good news is the new version, the R version r-version, r-version r-wrips that right out. It's gone.

So if you play the new version, don't worry. That's not in there anymore. They also added 10 new characters. So don't worry about the old game. The old game might as well not exist. You can play R version and please enjoy it because it is, it's a huge cast. It's got lots of fun characters. It's got lots of state.

There's stages that have motion in there. Like, you can get run over by a chariot. You can, like, you know, you can knock out a window and, like, have vampires get caught in the sun. They take damage. Like, this game is full of crazy background stuff. Again, made by fans, four fans. Yeah. Go nuts.

Like, I'm looking at this one fight where it's, like, Father Pucci versus somebody in Stode Ocean, and they actually have in the background, because this is Cape Canaveral, they have in the background the two ladies who fell out of the restroom and are dangling. Yes. They have them in the background as, like, a joke in the background. That's so detailed. Yeah, there's also, like, things that will happen in stages where, like, God, who's, uh, Kira's dad will, like, hit you, you know, if you're in, uh, the stage where it's his, like, house. I'm like, yeah, there's, there's, like, fun stuff happens in the background. I think, um, chariot requiem will, well, like, in his stage, you're like, you gotta take, you got to take, you got to take chariot requiem into account.

Hmm. He's walking around. Yeah, you got to walk around. Yeah. Bad stuff's going to happen. Oh, man, the drop in the steamroller looks really good in this one. It's really well animated. I think it's of the game, I will say of the Bando Namkai, Bandai Namco games that are like anime properties. This is the one that's like the most amount of love feel, at least for me. You know what I mean? Like I think the Naruto ones are supposed to be very good as well.

But like, these are the ones where I'm like, all right, this is, you care about this. That's ridiculous. Yeah. Well, Chris, I think you mentioned that the note's okay. I think CyberConnect does those too. So I think it's a lot of, I think that's also CyberConnectors. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

I'm sure they do like one piece or something. They put their whole ass in every game they make. Yeah, they do. And it's like not like you're never going to like play this at a tournament, but like it's not the point. You know what I mean? Like it's for you to have a good time. Hmm.

Do you want to talk about, do you want to talk about, do you want to keep talking about this or do you want to talk about the next game that's sort of between this and the remaster? I think we should move on to the next game because it is very, it's related to this game. And indeed, it has, I think it even runs in the same engine because the characters look very similar. And that is Jojo's Better Venture, Eyes of Heaven, which was 2015, PS3 in Japan, PS4 globally. It is cyber-checked again. And it is sort of, again, it's the same models you get 3D models, but now it's a 3D arena battle, and they're really big arenas. Like, these are really large stages, and they're all based on Jojo locations. and you've got as many, you've got like four different characters.

So, like, you've got two players and your opponents of two players, and you're running around, you're jumping, you're fighting, you're picking up boxes, you're throwing in each other, you're picking up weapons, you've got, like, story beats. It's a really different kind of game, but it is, it is still fighting, but it's also, but it's a very different kind of fighting game, and it's, it's a lot more almost like Power Stone, like it's very different. Yeah. But it's also, they also lean even harder into the story. Because the single-player mode is an entirely original story, not based on any novels, and it sort of tells like a time-traveling adventure where Jotaro from Star Wars Crusaders travels back in time and forward in time and across the universes to meet all these different Jojo characters in different situations. Yeah. And everyone meets up with another and some of them disappears, some of them come back. It's all tied in with the, you know, we don't want to spoil things, but it's tied into the, uh,

the McGuffin of part seven. Yep. And it is just... I was getting a vibe. I was going to say it's... I guess you would say it's like Game Master Anthony Jojo. Oh, yeah. Oh, yes.

Oh, yes. Everyone's here. They're all my friends. And they're all the young versions of themselves. Yeah. Like in their prime, being hot and hanging out. I think I like got done like a wiki hole of like what is the most powerful stand. And I think technically if you if you count.

this game. Yes. Deo stand is on paper with like the spider graph or whatever. You know what I mean? Like I think if on paper it's like a tie between like something that happens. One of the ones from Part 7, Gold Experience Requiem, like the Requiem stands. And then like this, which is basically a Dio. I think it's a Dio Requiem stand or a Dio like powered up stand. Not not Requiem, but like similar. The world over heaven, I think is what it is. That's what's called. And Heaven Ascension Deo, I would look up if you ever get a chance, because they somehow made him more extra. I'm not sure it was a good idea, but it's interesting looking. But I do love, I don't love playing this game as much as I enjoy the other fighting games, but I do like to watch it sometimes, and I really do enjoy the storytelling that's happening, and they've just, they've layered it with so many different dialogue situations. so many different characters meeting other characters, like, whenever the Golden Wind characters see Young Polnarev, they're like, hey, it's a turtle guy, and Polnerf's like, what do you mean turtle guy? What are you talking about? He's terrified by that notion. You can get Dio bonding

with Jarno, you know. I'm sure there's weird stuff when, you know, like young Jotaro meets Jolene, and she's like, oh my God, like my dad used to be hot, like, you know, it's all this weird stuff. Oh, oh, oh. It's sort of like for Dragon Ball Fighters single player campaign where you're just like, all right, you know. Yeah. You know, the weird like macuffin that you have to do to, like, get all these people together. And it's like, it yields weird things. But, yeah, if you're not already into Jojo, I don't think this game will make any sense to you whatsoever.

But if you are in a Jojo, I think you can, you can probably have a pretty good time just, you know, exploring all the menus and having all, you know, you can have all the sound test menus. You can, you can have all the characters, you know, talk to each other. and shout at you in Japanese and English. It's, I think this is definitely one of the earliest games where, yeah, they included the filthy acts at a reasonable price, D4C localization, just. Oh, that's where that's from. He's a playable character. Got it.

Yeah. He's playable in this game. Yeah, I was going to say, like, just looking up a summary of the story for this, and given when it was released and brought over here, what a, what a wild way for people to be introduced to some of the big story elements. of parts six and seven. Like, that's just, I can't even imagine trying to wrap my head around any of this stuff without knowing where the series goes and just, you know, the kind of reality and timeline

shenanigans that take place. So, remarkable. This release, this release predates the part four animation. Mm-hmm. So, yeah, when this came out and was released in English, like, most people probably hadn't even gotten to part four yet. or maybe they were at fan translations of like the other later manga parts but yeah from an anime standpoint all you had was was star as crusader the first three parts you did not have diamond

you didn't have golden wind yet so again a lot of the voice actors are different because they hadn't cast them yet so ah that makes sense i think i think i do love that strategy of like yeah you scanlation freaks like this all right i know we're running late on time and i know Chris, you have to go, but I do want to mention one last game here just because it is very recent, it is ongoing, and it is definitely a weird thing that is really, I promise you it exists.

Jojo's Bazaar Adventure, last survivor. It debuted in 2019 only in Japanese arcades. This is a dedicated game in arcades, but it's an online battle royale game. It's basically Fortnite with stands. It's so cool looking. I want to play

that game so much. It's so, it is officially based on the anime, not the manga, and you can have up to 20 players at one time. You've got fighters from basically parts three through six, but it's, it's online, so they keep adding new characters. Who knows what's coming next? I don't know. No one knows. It reminds me of like whenever they have a Gundam Aranum game, like the actual controller. It also is weirdly rendered. Like, it's not cell shaded. It's like actually like the characters just look 3D and a little, it's a little bit like jump force where you're like, that's not the correct engine to use, but okay.

Yeah, I wish I I could, I want to play more of this game But honestly, the whole point of the battle royale To me is that you get to play for free And you mess up and you try again But this is an arcade machine So you got put in more money Sounds like a perfect strategy

I also love that seems to take place in Mario They're just like running around the suburbs Like beating each other up Yeah, I think at this point I think this point there's like There's a Mario stage and an Egypt stage I think there's only two stages right now But they're probably working on more

stages. But yeah, the cast, the cast is varied and they're, they keep adding more characters, they keep adding more costumes. Like, they probably, I think they started with, you know, part three, Jotoro, and then they added part four Jotoro. And I think they just added part six Jodoro. So, uh, I know most of the bosses are there now, you know, obviously as the anime moved on, they wanted to add more anime characters. I think they added some part six characters recently. I don't know what's coming next, but I know, I know they're still supporting it. I know they keep adding, they keep having, uh, you know, location test. and they keep adding new stuff.

So this is very much unretro. This is not, you know, we can't really do much retro talk here because it's new. Right. But it's real and it's out there. And if you come to Japan and you want a pony up, you can play it. Good luck. Yeah, this is, this is extremely not my kind of game. But just, you know, watching some of the videos of it, I was struck by some of the way it handles things.

Like, I love the fact that you can kind of get a sense of where other players are because they're creating sound effects onomatopaeas, you know, and go, go, go, go, or whatever, all around the screen. And you can kind of like say, oh, well, instead of having a radar, it's like, oh, there's the sound effects over here and over here. So I have to decide where I want to go. I wonder if different characters make, like, consistently different sound effects. Like, would like, Koichi's footsteps sound lighter than other characters' footsteps? Because he's tiny, like, you know. I mean, you would assume with echoes he could make, he can make false footsteps. you know? Oh, that is

probably. That is true. I do respect that like they seem to be like with these anime properties just like like what's Dragon Ball the breakers. You know what I mean? Like that's a weird game that like people don't acknowledge is real because it's like sort of like a horror game. It's like dead by daylight but kind of like battle royale. It's weird. Like they're just throwing shit at the wall because they're realizing they want to like do new stuff. I don't know. Yeah. And Dragon Ball also has, yeah, they have got their own sort of arcade-exclusive, like, arena-fighting game where you go online and you battle people and you're throwing common about each other.

It's, yeah, Japanese arcades are in a weird place right now. They're not dead. They're not thriving, but a lot of people are doing weird things there that I wish, you know, it's almost unfortunate that, you know, the only way to play them is to go to the arcade. And, you know, obviously, if you don't speak Japanese, you can't do that. So, yeah. Well, I think we're running out of time. I think we're running out of time.

I think that the stars in the sky are moving. moving too fast. We need to run back. We need to go back. Chris, I think you have to go really soon. So why don't you give us one last thought here and then tell people where to find you? I don't know, man. I just like, I think I respect the lineage of, and I think you've mentioned this in previous episodes, like, not even the games themselves, although the games are good, but like, man, just its influence on games is so much larger than even the games that came out. like the arcade game's good PS2 Golden Wing games pretty good

you can have a lot of fun with Eyes of Heaven but that's like nothing compared to like I don't know dark stockers or like any persona

like that that looms so much larger than the actual games themselves even though the games themselves are pretty okay some of them occasionally

depending on the version you get get the Dreamcast version that was my favorite and where can they find you on the internet uh yeah I pop a Pishu on Twitter.

I blog at the verge. I have a show called Highlight Reel. Please send me clips of games because I always love showcasing weird glitches and stuff. But yeah, YouTube. You can actually do YouTube.com slash at Highlight Reel now. They added the ability to have like ads in URLs now on YouTube, which is a nice, one of the few nice touches that YouTube has improved. And then doubling down on copy on, like getting copyright striked is the other one.

But yeah, follow me. I blog that stuff. Thank you, Chris. So, just, what are your last thoughts here about the Jojo games in general? I guess, you know, I mean, Chris nailed it there. Obviously, like, the influences are, the ripples across time are far-reaching, and that's something that's incredibly impressive, how pervasive that the cultural influence of Jojo has been over many, many decades. But I still, I wish there was a Jojo game for me that I want to

play. Because like I said, like I'm not really into fighting games. I'm also not into like battle royale games, even though it's like, oh, hey, a new genre. Oh, it's also one I don't really like that much. But I'm, you know, holding on hope that maybe one day there'll be some sort of like action-adventure, like exploration game or something like that, or a mystery game because the Morio arc is kind of like a murder mystery type thing. So fingers crossed, one day, there'll be a Jojo game for all of us because there's so much material to work with. Damn. And you can find me. I am Jess O'Brien.

I am at Voidberger on pretty much everything that matters. Twitter, although it's dying, seems like. Mastodon, all the other places, co-hosts, YouTube, Twitch, all those places. It's Voidberger. and I am currently a little bit unemployed. So if you have any editing work or podcast stuff you want me to show up on, hit me up. Also, Jess, I wanted to give you a shout out. I watched your birthday stream, and I thought it was so brilliant that you were playing a VR game,

but you were on camera, so we got to watch you sort of like lean over and try to pick things up and stumble around. And it was just, it made the whole game even more exciting for me. as a person who can't really do VR games. So I thought that was really funny. Yeah, I got a really big green screen semi recently, and I've been Jonzing to do more VR stuff. Unfortunately, I just hurt my shoulder three days ago mysteriously. So it's like, I want to get back into it.

But there's so much shoulder action going on with VR stuff. But, yeah, I hope I can do more of that stuff soon. It was really ridiculous. Thank you. And Jeremy, please. What's your final thoughts here about Jojo games, or maybe what Jojo games do you want that you haven't gotten yet? I would say the one takeaway that I really, that sticks with me, is that in all the like footage watching and sampling that I've done for these couple of podcasts, I haven't really seen a video game that leans into the sort of meta-textual element of the series. the way that the opening animations do of the cartoon series that's been running over the past

decade, where once you discover what the villain's power is, at the climax of the final few episodes of the season, the villain takes over the opening animation, like exerts their power on the opening animation, and scrambles it, changes it, rests it to their will. And that's such a great, interesting element that, you know, like the first time it happened, I was, I was like, oh my God, what just happened? Like, what did Dio just do? That's so cool. And I haven't seen a video game that really does anything. I lost my mind when that happened. Yeah. I honestly couldn't believe that it happened. I had to rewind and watch it again. I haven't seen a video game really do that. And I feel like the interactive medium is so ripe for that. Like I want to see, you know, someone go beyond like CyberConnect 2's oh we really love this series we're putting everything in here look at all these references and really thinking like you know like putting on Araki's brain and like saying how can I bend this medium you know Kojima like to really explore the nature of the series that's that's something I would like to see that would and you know I kind

of I think share similar tastes to Jess so I would like to see them do that in a game for me Can I, can I suggest something? Do it. Thus speak Rohan Kashibi, maybe like a visual novel? Maybe a little slice of life thing with a little Rohan action. Well, I want, you know, Rohan Kashiba's like little side situation was very like horror themed. And it's like, oh, come on, Iraqi, you have the horror chops. Can we like translate this into like a horror genre of game, please?

Any day now, maybe. He visits the Louvre. Yeah, he takes a. over, he takes over the 3DS Louv Guide software. He just shows up and he's like, here's what you want to see. I've read it in your profile.

And Jeremy, where can they find you around the internet? Oh, right, the internet. You can find me on Twitter while it's still alive before it's destroyed by its terrible owner. As GameSpite, you can find me doing stuff at Limited Run games and on YouTube, and

Retronauts here, of course, on YouTube as Jeremy Parrish. That's me. And as for me, well, I continue to love Jojo, and I feel like these games, well, I do, I am a fighting game lover. I certainly still, I still feel like because Jojo is lasted so long and because these characters have such popularity now, you know, across all genres, I feel like they really couldn't make a Jojo game about anything at this point. And it would probably do, you know, it would find somebody, you know? I really think they should, they should explore a game that's not just about the fighting, even though I know. You know, obviously we want the stands to punch each other, but, you know, the stands can also be friends. The stands could solve puzzles.

The stands. Let me date the stands. Give us Tony Tonio's cooking mama spin-off. Oh, man, yeah. The best beginning in the world. Oh, my goodness. But, yeah, you can find me on the internet as Fight Club, F-E-I-T is my last name, C-L-U-B, that's a English word. But of course, I also do a lot of work for Retronauts, so I should also mention our Retronaut stuff, because this is Retronauts, and we are fans supported.

Thank you so much for doing that. If you go to Patreon.com slash Retronauts, for $3 a month, you get all our episodes when week early, the audio quality is a little bit better. For $5 a month, just $2 more, you get two exclusive episodes every month. You get exclusive stuff from me. Every week, I write columns, I read them to you. You get Discord access. You get our brand new community podcast. That's also me.

Isn't that great? You get a lot of me in this Patreon. You're kind of doing the Dio opening credits thing, just taking over the show. Slowly but surely. This has been my long con. All right. So I guess we're warping to another universe and things are getting real dark. So before we leave, good night, everybody.

Good night. Bye. Thinking about all the things I'd like to do in my life. In my life, I'm a dreamer, a distant dreamer, dreaming of, dreaming of a distant dreamer, Dreaming for all from today. Wee!