Zoroark Cutie
The Illusion Fox Skyfarer
- 2,511
- Posts
- 9
- Years
- Age 29
- Auguste Isles
- Seen Dec 13, 2017
So I've pretty much disappeared and was stuck in a void for some time all thanks to Payday 2. Seriously, that game is my addiction. Over the past year, I've been addicted to Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. I went through the entire current anime series and currently up to date and caught up to it. It's pretty much my 2nd favorite anime of all time at this point. Hardly any filler, if none at all, I love every single character and I'm sort of see the Jojos as the kind of people I want to be, fun action, and many great moments during it. Now I didn't get to play the PS3 Jojo game known as All-Star Battle mostly because I was late to the party for it and also because Eyes of Heaven was going to be out really soon, but I know some things about it and I thought it looked fun.
Now first things first, if you don't know anything about Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, I can not recommend this game at all mostly due to that it takes place right at the end of Stardust Crusaders. I recommend that if anyone is willing to try this game out, watch the anime all the way up to the end of Stardust Crusaders, then play this game, and I hate to spoil this so early, but recommending this game is very hard. That's not to say that this game is terrible or bad, but rather it has some very glaring problems that makes it very hard to recommend.
The first big issue are the modes that this game has. This is a 2v2 arena fighter, you play as one character, and the AI controls the 2nd fighter you have chose, and every stage is a small arena with items to pick up, places to platform, and hazards and events that are in it. Now I'm not a game designer, so I don't know how much you could do with something like this. What I do know is that there are not a lot of modes in this game. If you count all the playable modes you have Story, Free Play, and Online (or Network, or whatever they call it in the game), and if you count all the modes, you have Gallery, Customization, Shop, Options, and some sort of Encyclopedia section. There is no modes where you can play mini-games, no modes modes that change up the game in any kind of bit, and the most important one of all, there is no training mode. If you want to train and get used to a character, you'll have to do it in matches against computers, and this is not a good way to train especially since some of the characters are a bit confusing to use and difficult to understand sometimes. Gallery lets you look at character models and all that kind of jazz. Customization basically lets you customize your profile in the way that Marvel vs. Capcom 3 lets you, and also lets you set up presets. Shop lets you purchase items, extra quotes, special effects, colors, and outfits. One problem I do have with the shop is that you don't get to see what quotes, effects, and colors you are getting when you purchase them. However, I will say this, you will have no reason to purchase anything from the shop and I'll go over that later. I didn't even bother with Online, and Options is pretty straightforward, so that really only leaves the Encyclopedia section which I honestly forgot what it was called. I do like the inclusion of this since it does give people who are new to the series or haven't seen specific arcs to know some of the characters and events that had happened.
The main meat of the game is the Story mode, which I'm actually surprised was very fleshed out and actually acted like something you would see happen in Jojo. Unfortunately it is hard to talk about the story without spoiling the ending to Stardust Crusaders. So this is where I have to warn that there will be some Spoilers ahead.
The story starts at the end of Stardust Crusaders, where Jotaro defeats DIO in their fight on the bridge. Robert E.O. Speedwagon from Phantom Blood shows up and it is shown that some characters who were dead have came back to life under the control of an evil force, and the only way to break the curse is to gather every part of the Holy Corpse from the Steel Ball Run arc, and Jotaro has to travel from different time periods that will take part in one of the 8 arcs of the Jojo series, including the ongoing JoJolion. The story is surprisingly long, and I'm not going to lie, it really honestly take me a while to get through it mostly because the story has a lot of dialogue, however this could be attributed that the game does have extra missions and I spent some doing those as well as some other fights in the game. I wanna say it was about 8 hours from beginning to end without doing any missions or extra fights. The story itself was intriguing and I honestly really liked it. It's in no way a canon story, so for anyone thinking that they have to play it in order to get the full Jojo experience, it is not needed in order to get the entire story or the Jojo series. However, there are some notable flaws with the story. For one, the story mode definitely highlights one of the few minor annoyances, and that is the animation. During any sort of text dialogue between characters and not in a cutscene, the lip syncing would look really bad 90% of the time, and keep in mind that this game does not have an option to switch dubs, so no excuse that it should be played in the Japanese dub since the Japanese dub is the only dub in the game. Characters have the same mouth animations when speaking out of cutscenes and would move even when the character themselves were sighing or taking a pause and only stopped once they were finished talking. The missions in the game were also something else I could complain about since each mission felt the same, except they were more like themed fights. There was a bit of difference and that comes much later in the game once you have a poker match with Darby, but let me just say that the poker parts of the game were stupidly easy. I didn't lose a single one of the times I played the poker mini-game. It plays like poker, except you'll have qte events to foil a bluff or keep Darby from cheating, in the same sense you can bluff as well, but you won't go through a mini-game, however you will if you decide to cheat while deciding to switch out cards or not. There's the big issue, cheating is OPow in the mini-game and it is very easy to win just by doing this as all you would need to do is activate a cheat, do it successfully, trade away some cards, then raise your hand, and it doesn't matter if Darby folds or calls your raise, because there aren't many chips just like in Stardust Crusaders and you earn cheats back very fast in it, and it doesn't help that if you do every thing right, Darby will always have garbage hands. There will also be points in the game stories will you be locked out of certain characters, such as during the Steel Ball Run and JoJolion chapters, and in the very last chapter in the game, so if you are not a fan of that, keep that in mind. You also get rewards for finishing each fight or mission and depending on the grade you get will depend on how many of the rewards you get. These same rewards are the extra stuff that you can buy in the shop, so if you S rank everything, you will have almost no reason to even use the shop. Although it is fair to say that some of the fights are not easy to get S ranks on even with highly leveled up characters, an example would be anything fight or mission where you are forced to play as Johnny Joestar, and maybe it's because I suck playing as Johnny, but due to his nature of being a ranged user who's normal attack involves using single pew pew shots with his finger gun ability, it was really difficult to pull of combos. Each character gains experience in the Story mode and you'll experience points as well as having each characters Trust go up with the other characters in each fight increase after each match and you can buy abilities and buffs in ability menus, just be ready to upgrade a lot since every character gets experience after each fight, and I don't mean in the sense the 2 characters you played as, I mean in the sense that every character that you can play as gets experience and it is not too difficult to have over-leveled characters. You also get items to use in the story mode that give you some sort of advantage, and while it is clear on what they do, most, if not every, item is named after a quote from one of the parts of the series, so good luck on memorizing each item so you can quickly select what you want/need without reading what each one does. Beating each chapter up to JoJolion will unlock a new arena to mess around with, however these stages don't have much to do outside of fights, you can get stuff from them, participate in some off story fights that are not part of missions, and collect some stickers to turn in for Rohan and also talk to some of the characters, but they either don't have much to say or they will say stuff you would not care about.
The core gameplay lies in its 2v2 arena fighting. There is a large selection of characters to choose in the game with at least 2 characters from each part making it in. JoJolion (Part 8) has the least amount with just 2 characters since that part is still going on, followed up with Phantom Blood (Part 1) with just 4 characters, then Steel Ball Run (Part 7) with 5 characters, Stone Ocean (Part 6) with 6 characters, Battle Tendency (Part 2) and Vento Auero (Part 5) with 7 characters, Diamond is Unbreakable (Part 4) with 10 characters, and Stardust Crusaders (Part 3) with 12 characters, and this is counting characters such as Pucci and New Moon Pucci which even though it is the same character, they do function a bit differently. A few things in the gameplay is a Stamina meter, which thankfully doesn't deplete when you attack, it only depletes when you use have your character sprint towards a direction. The only exception is Pet Shop who depletes its stamina meter just by moving around, and making you a sitting duck once you run out of stamina. Every fighter gets 3 bars of health; green, orange, and red. You start of green at the beginning of each match, take enough damage and you'll go into a Down status, and move onto orange, and followed by red and once you lose your red health bar, your character either gets Retired or it is a KO and the remaining character will get a buff that gives them a purple heath bar and I would imagine they also get a buff to their damage and speed, although I can't really tell, and the purple health bar is just an extra health bar that signals that you got that buff on you which you can also trigger when your Heat gauge reaches a certain amount. I like this as it does make each fight not very short, but the one thing that I do get annoyed by is the Down status. You will automatically get knocked down to the ground if you get this status, so imagine that you are trying to get a combo set up and then the opponent gets into the Down status, and messes up your combo. The aforementioned Heat gauge builds up over the course of each fight and has 6 segments to it. Fill one segment up and you get a Dual Combo, fill 3 segments of the gauge and you can pull a Dual Heat Attack, and your partner has been KOed then filling up a segment will let you reactivate the buff. The Dual Combo activates when both your character and your partner use it, and it gives both of you a buff, as well as a meter and time limit, if that meter is filled before time runs out then whoever attacked last will do a special move that will do extra damage to whoever they hit and both characters will be healed. For a Dual Heat Attack, you sprint towards a character and if that hits, you'll do a very flashy special attack that will do a lot of damage, to the point that one of them will nearly take away an entire health bar. Some of the character combinations will also have special Dual Heat Attacks which have unique animations, examples being like Jonathan Joestar and William Zeppeli, Joesph Joestar and Lisa Lisa, Jotaro and Polneraff, Dio Brando and DIO, and Jotaro and Jolyne among others. This also brings in on reason why I counted repeat characters like the aforementioned Pucci and New Moon Pucci, since New Moon Pucci can be paired with DIO for a special Dual Heat Attack, but regular Pucci can't. The Dual Heat Attacks also showcase one of the biggest issues with Eyes of Heaven, how lazy it is. A good majority of the Dual Heat Attacks that don't have Special animations are ripped right from All-Star Battle with not much changed. The fighting itself is also really simple with Square being your normal attack, Triangle being your heavy attack, X being your jump, and Circle being your dodge, with special abilities mapped to L1+ any of the buttons and special moves mapped to to R1 and Sprint and Guard being mapped R2 and L2 (or the other way around, I forgot which one was which). The arenas are nicely designed and some of them do have special events, like the Joestar Residence map will have vampires near the windows and will also catch on fire or in the arena that is based from Stardust Crusaders where everyone has a dream in an amusement park, that arena has Death XIII show up every once in a while to attack players. There is one BS thing about the combat and that is that in matches against bots, if your controlled character gets KOed, you instantly lose and you don't get switched over to the other character and get the buff which I think is a really odd choice. You also get graded after each match and performing certain things will get you some sort of extra thing to get a higher rank, and you'll get in-game currency to buy stuff at the shop. One last thing, and I forgot about this since I rarely see it happen, is that sometimes some characters won't KO after losing all their health, and instead get a buff and have one more chance at fighting, but I rarely see this happen nor do I know how it is triggered.
To summarize the entire game up and to summarize my absolutely biggest complaint about this game, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Eyes of Heaven, while I found it fun to play and I really liked the story, it's also really lazy. This game may have had a lot of time and dedication put into it, but honestly I can only see that in terms of the art design and story, and that's really about it and even then the art looks like something that was really easy to do, so honestly, only the story looks like it had the most amount of time put into it. What exactly makes this game lazy? Lack of content. Yes, there are missions in the game, and there's a lot of them and the story is pretty lengthy, but that is about it and as I said earlier, the missions aren't exactly special. Animations outside of battle and cutscenes are really poor, a severe lack of modes in the game, lack of interesting unlocks, way too simple combat, lack of stages (Oh yeah I forgot about that. There's not many stages in the game. There is a total of 12 stages in the entire game, with at most 2 stages coming from each arc with the minimum of 1 for each arc and I find it very hard to believe that there was no way more could be added, not with how many places that there are in the Jojo universe.), and just overall lack of a lot to do, it makes it very difficult to recommend this game. The price of the game also makes it hard to recommend it as well, being priced at the full retail price of $59.99. To be honest, I can't see $59.99 worth of content in this game. Maybe I'm being a bit harsh on this game and the real meat of this game comes from the Story mode and from the gameplay, but even then, I can not see how that justifies $59.99. Again, and for the third time, yeah I get that the story is lengthy and that there are side missions and that kind of crap, but for a third time those missions don't add a whole lot and the story if you are going just straight through it is about 8 hours long. The game is fun to play, I did complain about the combat being simple, but I will say that it is still a fun game to play so I will get it that, the story was good in my opinion, and I can see other people enjoying this game. Can I recommend it at full retail price? Absolutely not. I can somewhat recommend it to people who have not played All-Star Battle and really love the Jojo series, but even they might grow tired of it once they are done with the story, do everything in it, and mess around in Free Play a bit or maybe even get some exciting matches from the online. I would say that this game is worth checking out, but I would say that it is best to wait until the price of this game drops or it goes on sale.
Now first things first, if you don't know anything about Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, I can not recommend this game at all mostly due to that it takes place right at the end of Stardust Crusaders. I recommend that if anyone is willing to try this game out, watch the anime all the way up to the end of Stardust Crusaders, then play this game, and I hate to spoil this so early, but recommending this game is very hard. That's not to say that this game is terrible or bad, but rather it has some very glaring problems that makes it very hard to recommend.
The first big issue are the modes that this game has. This is a 2v2 arena fighter, you play as one character, and the AI controls the 2nd fighter you have chose, and every stage is a small arena with items to pick up, places to platform, and hazards and events that are in it. Now I'm not a game designer, so I don't know how much you could do with something like this. What I do know is that there are not a lot of modes in this game. If you count all the playable modes you have Story, Free Play, and Online (or Network, or whatever they call it in the game), and if you count all the modes, you have Gallery, Customization, Shop, Options, and some sort of Encyclopedia section. There is no modes where you can play mini-games, no modes modes that change up the game in any kind of bit, and the most important one of all, there is no training mode. If you want to train and get used to a character, you'll have to do it in matches against computers, and this is not a good way to train especially since some of the characters are a bit confusing to use and difficult to understand sometimes. Gallery lets you look at character models and all that kind of jazz. Customization basically lets you customize your profile in the way that Marvel vs. Capcom 3 lets you, and also lets you set up presets. Shop lets you purchase items, extra quotes, special effects, colors, and outfits. One problem I do have with the shop is that you don't get to see what quotes, effects, and colors you are getting when you purchase them. However, I will say this, you will have no reason to purchase anything from the shop and I'll go over that later. I didn't even bother with Online, and Options is pretty straightforward, so that really only leaves the Encyclopedia section which I honestly forgot what it was called. I do like the inclusion of this since it does give people who are new to the series or haven't seen specific arcs to know some of the characters and events that had happened.
The main meat of the game is the Story mode, which I'm actually surprised was very fleshed out and actually acted like something you would see happen in Jojo. Unfortunately it is hard to talk about the story without spoiling the ending to Stardust Crusaders. So this is where I have to warn that there will be some Spoilers ahead.
The story starts at the end of Stardust Crusaders, where Jotaro defeats DIO in their fight on the bridge. Robert E.O. Speedwagon from Phantom Blood shows up and it is shown that some characters who were dead have came back to life under the control of an evil force, and the only way to break the curse is to gather every part of the Holy Corpse from the Steel Ball Run arc, and Jotaro has to travel from different time periods that will take part in one of the 8 arcs of the Jojo series, including the ongoing JoJolion. The story is surprisingly long, and I'm not going to lie, it really honestly take me a while to get through it mostly because the story has a lot of dialogue, however this could be attributed that the game does have extra missions and I spent some doing those as well as some other fights in the game. I wanna say it was about 8 hours from beginning to end without doing any missions or extra fights. The story itself was intriguing and I honestly really liked it. It's in no way a canon story, so for anyone thinking that they have to play it in order to get the full Jojo experience, it is not needed in order to get the entire story or the Jojo series. However, there are some notable flaws with the story. For one, the story mode definitely highlights one of the few minor annoyances, and that is the animation. During any sort of text dialogue between characters and not in a cutscene, the lip syncing would look really bad 90% of the time, and keep in mind that this game does not have an option to switch dubs, so no excuse that it should be played in the Japanese dub since the Japanese dub is the only dub in the game. Characters have the same mouth animations when speaking out of cutscenes and would move even when the character themselves were sighing or taking a pause and only stopped once they were finished talking. The missions in the game were also something else I could complain about since each mission felt the same, except they were more like themed fights. There was a bit of difference and that comes much later in the game once you have a poker match with Darby, but let me just say that the poker parts of the game were stupidly easy. I didn't lose a single one of the times I played the poker mini-game. It plays like poker, except you'll have qte events to foil a bluff or keep Darby from cheating, in the same sense you can bluff as well, but you won't go through a mini-game, however you will if you decide to cheat while deciding to switch out cards or not. There's the big issue, cheating is OPow in the mini-game and it is very easy to win just by doing this as all you would need to do is activate a cheat, do it successfully, trade away some cards, then raise your hand, and it doesn't matter if Darby folds or calls your raise, because there aren't many chips just like in Stardust Crusaders and you earn cheats back very fast in it, and it doesn't help that if you do every thing right, Darby will always have garbage hands. There will also be points in the game stories will you be locked out of certain characters, such as during the Steel Ball Run and JoJolion chapters, and in the very last chapter in the game, so if you are not a fan of that, keep that in mind. You also get rewards for finishing each fight or mission and depending on the grade you get will depend on how many of the rewards you get. These same rewards are the extra stuff that you can buy in the shop, so if you S rank everything, you will have almost no reason to even use the shop. Although it is fair to say that some of the fights are not easy to get S ranks on even with highly leveled up characters, an example would be anything fight or mission where you are forced to play as Johnny Joestar, and maybe it's because I suck playing as Johnny, but due to his nature of being a ranged user who's normal attack involves using single pew pew shots with his finger gun ability, it was really difficult to pull of combos. Each character gains experience in the Story mode and you'll experience points as well as having each characters Trust go up with the other characters in each fight increase after each match and you can buy abilities and buffs in ability menus, just be ready to upgrade a lot since every character gets experience after each fight, and I don't mean in the sense the 2 characters you played as, I mean in the sense that every character that you can play as gets experience and it is not too difficult to have over-leveled characters. You also get items to use in the story mode that give you some sort of advantage, and while it is clear on what they do, most, if not every, item is named after a quote from one of the parts of the series, so good luck on memorizing each item so you can quickly select what you want/need without reading what each one does. Beating each chapter up to JoJolion will unlock a new arena to mess around with, however these stages don't have much to do outside of fights, you can get stuff from them, participate in some off story fights that are not part of missions, and collect some stickers to turn in for Rohan and also talk to some of the characters, but they either don't have much to say or they will say stuff you would not care about.
The core gameplay lies in its 2v2 arena fighting. There is a large selection of characters to choose in the game with at least 2 characters from each part making it in. JoJolion (Part 8) has the least amount with just 2 characters since that part is still going on, followed up with Phantom Blood (Part 1) with just 4 characters, then Steel Ball Run (Part 7) with 5 characters, Stone Ocean (Part 6) with 6 characters, Battle Tendency (Part 2) and Vento Auero (Part 5) with 7 characters, Diamond is Unbreakable (Part 4) with 10 characters, and Stardust Crusaders (Part 3) with 12 characters, and this is counting characters such as Pucci and New Moon Pucci which even though it is the same character, they do function a bit differently. A few things in the gameplay is a Stamina meter, which thankfully doesn't deplete when you attack, it only depletes when you use have your character sprint towards a direction. The only exception is Pet Shop who depletes its stamina meter just by moving around, and making you a sitting duck once you run out of stamina. Every fighter gets 3 bars of health; green, orange, and red. You start of green at the beginning of each match, take enough damage and you'll go into a Down status, and move onto orange, and followed by red and once you lose your red health bar, your character either gets Retired or it is a KO and the remaining character will get a buff that gives them a purple heath bar and I would imagine they also get a buff to their damage and speed, although I can't really tell, and the purple health bar is just an extra health bar that signals that you got that buff on you which you can also trigger when your Heat gauge reaches a certain amount. I like this as it does make each fight not very short, but the one thing that I do get annoyed by is the Down status. You will automatically get knocked down to the ground if you get this status, so imagine that you are trying to get a combo set up and then the opponent gets into the Down status, and messes up your combo. The aforementioned Heat gauge builds up over the course of each fight and has 6 segments to it. Fill one segment up and you get a Dual Combo, fill 3 segments of the gauge and you can pull a Dual Heat Attack, and your partner has been KOed then filling up a segment will let you reactivate the buff. The Dual Combo activates when both your character and your partner use it, and it gives both of you a buff, as well as a meter and time limit, if that meter is filled before time runs out then whoever attacked last will do a special move that will do extra damage to whoever they hit and both characters will be healed. For a Dual Heat Attack, you sprint towards a character and if that hits, you'll do a very flashy special attack that will do a lot of damage, to the point that one of them will nearly take away an entire health bar. Some of the character combinations will also have special Dual Heat Attacks which have unique animations, examples being like Jonathan Joestar and William Zeppeli, Joesph Joestar and Lisa Lisa, Jotaro and Polneraff, Dio Brando and DIO, and Jotaro and Jolyne among others. This also brings in on reason why I counted repeat characters like the aforementioned Pucci and New Moon Pucci, since New Moon Pucci can be paired with DIO for a special Dual Heat Attack, but regular Pucci can't. The Dual Heat Attacks also showcase one of the biggest issues with Eyes of Heaven, how lazy it is. A good majority of the Dual Heat Attacks that don't have Special animations are ripped right from All-Star Battle with not much changed. The fighting itself is also really simple with Square being your normal attack, Triangle being your heavy attack, X being your jump, and Circle being your dodge, with special abilities mapped to L1+ any of the buttons and special moves mapped to to R1 and Sprint and Guard being mapped R2 and L2 (or the other way around, I forgot which one was which). The arenas are nicely designed and some of them do have special events, like the Joestar Residence map will have vampires near the windows and will also catch on fire or in the arena that is based from Stardust Crusaders where everyone has a dream in an amusement park, that arena has Death XIII show up every once in a while to attack players. There is one BS thing about the combat and that is that in matches against bots, if your controlled character gets KOed, you instantly lose and you don't get switched over to the other character and get the buff which I think is a really odd choice. You also get graded after each match and performing certain things will get you some sort of extra thing to get a higher rank, and you'll get in-game currency to buy stuff at the shop. One last thing, and I forgot about this since I rarely see it happen, is that sometimes some characters won't KO after losing all their health, and instead get a buff and have one more chance at fighting, but I rarely see this happen nor do I know how it is triggered.
To summarize the entire game up and to summarize my absolutely biggest complaint about this game, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Eyes of Heaven, while I found it fun to play and I really liked the story, it's also really lazy. This game may have had a lot of time and dedication put into it, but honestly I can only see that in terms of the art design and story, and that's really about it and even then the art looks like something that was really easy to do, so honestly, only the story looks like it had the most amount of time put into it. What exactly makes this game lazy? Lack of content. Yes, there are missions in the game, and there's a lot of them and the story is pretty lengthy, but that is about it and as I said earlier, the missions aren't exactly special. Animations outside of battle and cutscenes are really poor, a severe lack of modes in the game, lack of interesting unlocks, way too simple combat, lack of stages (Oh yeah I forgot about that. There's not many stages in the game. There is a total of 12 stages in the entire game, with at most 2 stages coming from each arc with the minimum of 1 for each arc and I find it very hard to believe that there was no way more could be added, not with how many places that there are in the Jojo universe.), and just overall lack of a lot to do, it makes it very difficult to recommend this game. The price of the game also makes it hard to recommend it as well, being priced at the full retail price of $59.99. To be honest, I can't see $59.99 worth of content in this game. Maybe I'm being a bit harsh on this game and the real meat of this game comes from the Story mode and from the gameplay, but even then, I can not see how that justifies $59.99. Again, and for the third time, yeah I get that the story is lengthy and that there are side missions and that kind of crap, but for a third time those missions don't add a whole lot and the story if you are going just straight through it is about 8 hours long. The game is fun to play, I did complain about the combat being simple, but I will say that it is still a fun game to play so I will get it that, the story was good in my opinion, and I can see other people enjoying this game. Can I recommend it at full retail price? Absolutely not. I can somewhat recommend it to people who have not played All-Star Battle and really love the Jojo series, but even they might grow tired of it once they are done with the story, do everything in it, and mess around in Free Play a bit or maybe even get some exciting matches from the online. I would say that this game is worth checking out, but I would say that it is best to wait until the price of this game drops or it goes on sale.