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Bizarre is kinda the baseline for STRANGE ANIME LICENSE FRIDAY. So how fitting is it
that we’d feature... JOJO’S BIZARRE ADVENTURE. And no, not the fighting game that you’re
probably familiar with, what inspired various Toki wo Tomare shenanigans and people dropping
steamrollers all over the place. Nope, this is an RPG. Because why the hell not? We’ve
already established that everyone who was anyone in the mid ‘90s was getting on board
the RPG train. If Slayers can get away with it, certainly some ‘roided-out delinquents
with strange fashion sense can get away with it too.
As you may be noticing, the entirety of the action takes place in one narrow band across
the middle of the screen. It’s like super-letterboxing, dropping the actual animation space into a
4:1 ratio and leaving the rest of the screen free for text boxes, messages, speech bubbles
(of which there are numerous, both in-battle and out) and one-eyed portraits of the members
of your party. Ladies and gentlemen, this is what tarot-based RPGing looked like before
Persona. Battles feature some advanced techniques like studying your opponent and looking for
weak spots, using that data to capitalize with better attacks, and even trying to talk
your opponent out of some information while the fists and beams and mode-7 graphics and
what have you are still flying. Man, the more I think about it the more this is just Persona
with a double-scoop of creatine powder and freakin’ huge shoulders. It even starts
out in a school! Man, this is gettin’ creepy.
If you’re of the disposition to enjoy games based on distressingly long-running shonen
manga - the kind that can run from, say, 1989 right up until the present day - then this
will serve as a tolerable retelling of the third “arc” of the Jojo’s franchise.
(This is the same storyline that would be the basis for the fighting game, as well.)
But otherwise... you’re going to be wondering why you keep getting jumped by strange creatures
and wannabe-badass students while you’re just on your way to school. Also, the text
size used by this character set makes for some woefully compressed kanji, making for
a further impediment to enjoyment. Is it enough to offset the sheer novelty of the display,
though? I don’t think so. If nothing else, it’s a refreshing change of pace from the
top-down, tile-based, chibi-sprite overworld of so many SNES RPGs. Not an improvement or
a downgrade, mind, just a change of pace. When you want something a little more... y’know...
bizarre.