Review by Clark A.
On paper, the highly anticipated Jump Force evokes memories
of 2014's J-Stars Victory VS. They're both arena fighting games starring the
cast of Japan's best-selling weekly manga anthology, Shōnen Jump magazine. As anniversary
releases, they celebrate the spirit of the publication and the unforgettable faces
native to those pages.
Although J-Stars had a relatively milquetoast reception, the second Jump Force was unveiled at E3, it commanded attention. You had Luffy, star of the most popular manga in the world, standing on an American flag while Dragon Ball's most twisted villain, Freiza, decimated the buildings of New York City. The manga icons shown off suddenly had less cartoonish bodies to better suit the atmosphere of Times Square. Throw in an ominous narrator and Jump Force looked to have a genuine vision for a crossover game.
Eight months later, Jump Force has landed and no longer has
that air of intangibility surrounding it. It indeed offers the high octane anime
clashes it marketed. Alas, that E3 trailer also reflects what Jump Force tries
and fails to be, casting a shadow over its accomplishments.
The story kicks off as that New York City trailer did. Mega
popular Shōnen Jump mascots fend off the aforementioned threat of Frieza, but
not without a toll. The "player" is killed during this scuffle and revived
by Trunks (Dragon Ball Z) at the price of turning them into a super powered
being. Trunks introduces the player to the Jump Force organisation, a group of Shōnen
Jump heroes defending humanity from lurking threats. These include villains,
possessed heroes, and other humans called Venoms made to work for mysterious
forces. It's a premise designed to get all the manga characters into one place,
yes, but should function well as a setup for a crossover game.
From there you're sent to design your avatar. Character
creation is heavily based on entities already in the game, plus some that
resemble familiar characters. Cynics might call it a reshuffling of existing
assets and optimists might say it maintains stylistic consistency. However you
feel, it has led to convincing approximations of characters that didn't make
the roster such as Neferpitou and Android 18 so it's good enough for me. You
can expect options not dissimilar to Bandai Namco's Dragon Ball Xenoverse games;
sufficient for individuality but not enough to reinvent the wheel. The outfits you
collect in-game are also based on existing assets so you can make outlandish
combinations such as Ichigo's kimono with Yugi's hair.
As the latest member of the Jump Force, you're tasked with
completing missions. The basic formula is to rescue possessed heroes and
recruit them into Jump Force then occasionally seek an exclamation mark in the
hub world to advance the story. Players are given the choice of working for
Goku from Dragon Ball, Luffy from One Piece, or the eponymous Naruto. Each
leader runs an area of the hub world, but they're all much the same and have
little impact in the grand scheme of things. In fact, I question why said hub
world exists rather than a spiffy menu. The plaza is quite barren compared to
the likes of Dragon Ball Xenoverse, a fellow Bandai Namco-published title in a
similar vein. The bulk of your interactions will be spent walking to a booth
and recruiting more iconic members into the Jump Force.
As for the characters you'll employ, they're notably
different than J-Stars. J-Stars usually topped out at three characters per Jump
series. The rosters in both games are around the same (40) but Jump Force gives
Naruto, Dragon Ball, and One Piece six members each. Hunter x Hunter and Bleach
aren't far off with four. I do lament the loss of Medaka and Korosensei.
Thankfully, Jump Force provides a couple creative replacements such as Ryo from
City Hunter and Yugi from you-know-what. On the other hand again, J-Stars also
brought over a dozen support characters along for the ride, whereas Jump Force
lacks that level of fanservice. The bottom line is that J-Stars has a diverse
roster better suited to an anniversary game, but Jump Force's reflects a
worldwide market and the game's tone.
The setup for recruiting these otherworldly fighters is
typically Jump Force's Director Glover sending your avatar with some Jump representative
to a real world location such as the Alps. Your avatar's partner might have a
connection to the target or it can appear arbitrary. Unfortunately, these scenes
get old quickly because the writers cling to a rigid format that is mundane and
uneventful the first time around. You arrive, a hero is suddenly possessed,
then they comes to their senses once a malicious Umbra Cube is extracted after
combat.
The dialogue between combatants is too brief to take flight
and too stock to elicit any kind of emotion. It feels regurgitated and
rephrased even by characters from completely different properties. The best
written and most convincing interactions involve characters from the same
universe. Typically that happens to be One Piece, but Gon and Killua from
Hunter X Hunter have a meeting that should have set the minimum creative requirements.
Killua's intelligence and trust in Gon are actually demonstrated on screen and
it puts a little spin on the standard formula. Unfortunately, these
recruitments are the exception rather than the rule.
To illustrate how great these interactions could have been,
look at Ichigo Kurosaki versus Yusuke Urameshi early in the story. Bleach takes
heavy inspiration from Yuyu Hakusho and the protagonists have equivalent
positions as high school students in modern society. Yusuke is crass, thuggish,
and perverted, but under that exterior he's willing to risk his life for a
random child. Ichigo is perceived as a hooligan and gets into fights
unwillingly, but he'll tear down hierarchies and social standards if it means
protecting people. They're both rebellious high schoolers with missing parents,
but their differences in etiquette and philosophy towards fighting could be the
subject of amusing exchanges.
Even if the writers had no familiarity with either series,
reading a volume of each demonstrates enough characterisation for comedic dialogue
to write itself. Common knowledge will tell you they both fight monsters, work
part time for spiritually aware organisations, and spend story arcs struggling
with the nature of their bloodline. The list of comparisons is endless, but
only a few lines of text are needed to give their skirmish some context or
fanservice. What plays out in-game? Yusuke beats up a haunted Ichigo, who then acknowledges
his opponent's power and mentions Soul Society isn't happy about the collision
of worlds. It doesn't feel like either character is actually standing there. No
wisecracks, no winks to the audience, no effort at making the characters connect.
I didn't walk into this anime crossover game expecting
Orwellian writing nor fan fiction about Aizen's steamy lust for Kaguya. It's disheartening
when a crossover merely puts characters in the same space. With Jump Force,
it's worse because these characters and the real world setting could facilitate
all kinds of humour. Recent anime fighter My Hero One's Justice failed to tell
a cohesive story, but I can appreciate the difficulty involved in trying to
convey three seasons of plot. Jump Force doesn't have an excuse with access to
50 years of material for a crossover and numerous characters with blatant
commonalities you could weave a paragraph or two around.
I'm not one to heavily critique cutscene animations so long
as the story gets its point across, but Jump Force's scenes can
be...unsettling. The movements and expressions are jarring enough at times that
it would have been better served with simple text and pretty 2D character
portraits. I don't want to dig too deep but we're talking unfinished movement
animations, missing voice lines in otherwise voiced scenes, and reflexive use
of black screen transitions to seemingly avoid animating movement. My grander
objection is that this exemplifies how the developers bit off more than they
could chew, actively sacrificing the game's overall polish as a result.
When not recruiting new Jump Force combatants, the game dishes
out objectives that are as dull as the plot. Fighting Toguro from Yuyu Hakusho as
Naruto is a fine idea. Doing it three times consecutively and then later with
other characters is not. The writing
and scenarios improve a tad around the game's halfway point, but even then it's
limited and doesn't make up for missed opportunities. A lot more screen time is
given to brand new characters such as Director Glover, Galena, and Kane. Of
course, they also have no history in Shōnen Jump and thus take time away from
fanservice. Painfully obvious plot twists the viewer can predict the second a
character is introduced don't help matters. The non-playable Light Yagami from
Death Note throws an amusing wrench into situations, thankfully, so there's mild
amusement to be had there.
On the actual fighting end of the spectrum, the game is a
marked upgrade over J-Stars Victory VS. Jump Force opts for three on three
combat like its predecessor but reinterprets the execution. Instead of having
three simultaneous opponents in one arena, these are tag team matches.
Characters on a team share a collective health bar too, so swapping out is
really just scrolling through what attacks the player has access to at the
time. This allows for speedier fights with newfound intensity. You can also
call in allies to set up combos or bail you out of a tight situation. Those
tweaks alone make the gameplay tighter than J-Stars in my estimation. You're
encouraged to switch characters frequently as an extension of your strategy
rather than cleaning up the AI's mess. You don't need to worry about locking
onto characters or memorising button combinations; it's all straightforward.
The gameplay of arena fighters tends not to be as technical
as upper echelon of competitive fighting games such as Street Fighter. Jump
Force toes the line well enough to encourage a bit of skill but allow for casual
enjoyment. The central systems here lend themselves better to conventional reading
and countering than you'd anticipate. I wouldn't bank on the game's longevity
in the competitive scene by any means but in this world of patches, online
should be exciting for long enough. Due to the frenetic pace of combat, the
game is more instantly accessible than J-Stars. It does value silly fun over
competitive viability in some cases too. For instance, Sanji is a bit of a joke
character as he's completely unable to attack female characters. Thankfully,
you can play around this by using the tag team mechanic so it's not as if he's
unusable.
I've heard criticisms in the past that these kinds of anime
fighters would be better served as classical 2D experiences and that's frequently
true. However, the battles in Jump Force probably wouldn't be as high-energy
and hard hitting in that dimension. The giant arenas fit well with the attacks featured
and the nature of Shōnen Jump manga in general. The real world meets anime set
pieces are often quite stunning too (even if they're mostly just backdrops and
not properly leveraged by the story). The feedback of basic movement and being
launched across the map is just right. It all comes together quite nicely.
As a whole, the combat portion of the game does a better job
of providing fanservice than the story mode ever does. The dialogue between
fighters before a match is superior to what you'll find in the story mode. Some
cut corners, sure, but there's a healthy mixture of comedy, seriousness, and
fanservice. Killua calls out Asta from
Black Clover for cockiness being his strategy, not fully grasping the extent to
which that claim is correct. Yugi chastising Sasuke from Naruto for giving into
the hatred in his heart is perfect for the King of Games and has extra weight
if you've seen an anime filler arc. Blackbeard from One Piece inviting Toguro out
for a drink is logical and a nice callback to a character-building scene where
Toguro declares orange juice as his beverage of choice.
Whether or not you appreciate the added realism on these
larger than life character models, there is great care put into capturing the
intricacies of their designs. It's not just in the chatter or character models
either. All the famous attacks and techniques are here are authentic. When
Piccolo uses his Makankosappo technique, it pierces through his opponent's
chest just like it did against Goku in Dragon Ball Z. When Yugi summons Slifer
the Sky Dragon, you can see his sacrificed cards flying away. Even the battle
damage helps to recreate manga scenes, such as Shiryu from Saint Seiya fighting
without his protective cloth.
Awakenings allow characters to transform when the meter hits
a certain level. Wait for it to max out and you can go even further beyond. In
the case of Goku, that means going Super Saiyan Blue instead of classic Super
Saiyan. This opens up new tools while also providing even more fanservice, what
with transformations being a staple of Shōnen manga at this point. For those
unfamiliar with the source material, there's an awe factor in seeing what
exciting or dreadful redesign awaits.
All this love and attention to detail makes me a bit sad,
then. Many of the pre-battle interactions could been fleshed out into slightly
longer skits that exhibit what makes each character interesting. You could make
miniature arcade campaigns for each fighter not unlike Super Smash Bros.
Ultimate. The tournament structure, clichéd as it is, represents a Shōnen Jump
staple. Instead, we're stuck with a story mode that needed far more time in the
oven.
Jump Force fulfils its central purpose - anime fighting - splendidly.
Instead of focusing on that brilliance, the developers piled disconnected
features from other games on top. With better utilisation of fanservice and
context for the characters present, this could have gone down as Bandai Namco's
best outing in the category, but the love still shines through.
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