| | | Double port of Capcom's arcade fighting games JoJo's Venture from 1998, and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure from the following year, which added about 7 new characters to the original 11 weirdos.
The art and animation are very fluid, colorful, and stylized, and the characters are bizarre and zany; you can even play as I think a bird or a dog, although I haven't gone that far afield yet, personally. See, there are three attack buttons, of escalating strength, and then there's a fourth button, "Stand" (and a fifth button which is just a taunt as far as I can tell, but has a Japanese name I was not familiar with in the button configuration menu), that brings out or puts away the little supernatural familiar that almost every character has; while they're out, attack buttons will mostly use them for attacks, and some can attack almost independently of their host character, who can just sit back and chill--but the Stands can also be knocked off the screen if they get hit too much, although they can be brought back into action fairly quickly--but anyway I was going to say that some of the characters don't have independent Stands, which I like, because controlling two characters at once is kind of too much for my little monkey brain; so I like the characters that just have a sword or a gun (you can kind of steer the bullets! : oo) or a limpet mine kind of thing as their Stand.
Venture has a fairly typical Survival mode where you can fight through all the characters (with I think the boss-like Dio at the end? he killed me ;_;); Adventure has a "Challenge" mode instead, under the "Arcade" heading (the other option there is "Story"); "Challenge" is pretty much a Survival mode, with the minor twist that after winning a fight you get an energy boost that you can apply *either* to increasing your health or increasing your super meter (I think you *may* get a tiny health boost anyway if you apply it to the super meter?).
The super meter bears mentioning since it goes up to at least NINE, and in Adventure at least starts at one--so there are a lot of super moves popping off, with full-screen character portraits and zippy effects.
It's a pretty wild couple of games (I know nothing about the manga/anime from which it is licensed) that I may have to play more because as I get a little more used to the wacky "Stand" system, I like it more and more. I'd avoided playing it for a long time because unlike pretty much all of Capcom's other fighting game ports to the Dreamcast, it does not support the DC's VGA cable, which is unfortunate. |
|
|
| | | | Correction (from Wikipedia): "The original arcade game features fourteen playable characters whilst Heritage for the Future and subsequent ports add eight additional characters, bringing the total to twenty-two." |
|
|
| | |