Jump Force

Anyone who reads manga or watches anime will know the faces of the popular shows, so what do you do when the magazine they are featured in turns fifty this year? Answer? Throw all the characters together for a crossover fighting game! Developed by Spike Chunsoft and published by Bandai Namco all of the characters in the game come from the anthology magazine Shōnen Jump and the game was released on the 15^th of February 2019 on PS4, Xbox One and PC.

tl;dr – rating: 7/10

Positives:

+ Huge character roster of forty fighters (Plus 9 more in DLC)

+ Popular manga/anime like: My Hero’s Academia, Hunter X Hunter, Bleach and Yugioh

+ Detailed and fluid fighting, combat is easy to learn, difficult to master

+ All characters available for offline/online matches very early on

+ Highly customisable player-made characters

Negatives:

— Weak story with short and flat cutscenes

— A lot of loading screens (although the patch has fixed loading times somewhat)

— Not every ability is available for the custom character to use

— No English dialogue option

So what’s the game all about? It’s an anniversary celebration so don’t expect a gripping storyline but it’s about as good an explanation that you could get. The story is that many different worlds (from manga and anime universes) have become linked together and have allowed characters to come to Earth. Many of the heroic characters have joined the ‘Jump Force’ to fight off the evil ones attempting to take control of Earth and some of the other worlds (like Dragon Ball’s Namek). You start the game by designing your own custom character who, naturally, gets throw in to the whole situation. You then start to investigate why some of the characters are mysteriously turning evil after two new characters have appeared…

The player-made character surprisingly has an absolute tonne of customisability to them. You can change build, body type, body colour, facial features and more in great detail. You can even choose to have a different left eye to your character’s right (or vice versa). After you’ve made your character the customising doesn’t end there, you can also select different outfits and clothing for your character many of which pay tribute to characters from the different manga and anime in the game, such as One Piece’s Buggy’s bright red clown nose, or Dragon Ball’s Krillin’s Shaolin markings.

You also get to give your own character their own abilities that other characters use. So if there is a particular character you like there is a good chance you can use their abilities for yourself. One downside to this is not every character’s abilities can be used, which is a gigantic shame since this was meant to be the main incentive for the custom characters. I understand that sometimes the abilities are specialised for the character but some popular characters like Monkey D. Luffy have only one attack that you can learn. Some character’s skills use swords as well but even so they have managed to get around that by having your custom character creating a sword out of blue energy for any ability skills that use swords. This is a brilliant work around and it would have been nice to see some more work arounds to get more abilities usable.

That said the amount of abilities in the game is quite high and there is a lot of flexibility and choice. This is largely in part to the massive roster of characters in the game at a current total of forty characters (With 9 more on their way through the DLC Character Pass). All of the characters are accessible and playable in the Online and Offline Battling section too, which is nice. This means if you just want to battle online or with a friend you don’t have to grind through the story to unlock the characters. The characters do unlock over time in the story mode however but that’s because it’s integral to the story itself. It seems that all of the usable abilities of each character are immediately available for purchase in the in-game shop for your custom character too, the shop uses gold as its currency which you earn through completing storyline missions or any side/extra missions you do. This means that within the first half an hour you have access to a lot of the content of the game, which is great since each person will have their own favourite manga or anime characters that they’ll want to play and use.

When you’re not out fighting or doing missions you’ll spend a lot of time in the main hub. It’s comprised of four areas. The central area which has the Offline/Online fighting counter, a mission counter and places like the leaderboard, shop and login reward desks. The other three areas are each team’s base zone. The teams are: Alpha (Attackers) lead by Goku, Beta (Defenders) led by Luffy and Gamma (Infiltrators) led by Naruto. Each team is made up of a few members of the ‘big three’ Dragon Ball, One Piece and Naruto, and each of their base zones are stylised on their leader’s manga/anime. The main hub is also filled with random NPC filler characters that are there to try and make it look busy. It doesn’t work, playing offline leaves the whole area feel too big and empty, it’s only when you connect to the online server and see all of the other players and their own created characters running around from place to place that the hub feels alive. For some reason however you can’t switch between the two modes of play in the lobby and have to exit to the main menu to switch to online or offline. You can also get ‘active points’ from doing actions in the lobby whilst connected online but I haven’t found out what they do yet… but I know I have a lot of them!

Many of the missions you’ll do at the mission counters aren’t directly involved with the story, sometimes it’s just to earn other rewards such as gold or costumes. Completing the missions still rewards experience points though and you can still level-up your character from doing them (although the game hasn’t been too clear with what levelling up does) you can also receiving J-skills and Ability skills to attach to your character. Ability skills provide your characters abilities with additional affects such as lowering an enemy’s attack or defence or making your own abilities hit harder. J-skills are attached to your character and provide a positive effect whilst you battle such as ability gauges charging up faster, or stronger attacks and you can have up to three active at once.

The actual combat and fighting then is what the game is all about and is its main focus. The fighting is easy to pick up but difficult to master as there are a lot of different techniques you can do. The game does a fairly good job of teaching you all the basics in the first few missions and some are even tutorial-based with the enemy not actually engaging you in combat, but allowing you to practise the moves the game teaches you. The combat is all very fluid and with some practise it becomes easy to string certain attack combo’s together, you have rush attacks, which act as your light and fast attacks, heavy attacks, which are slower but more powerful and grab attacks which can break an enemy’s guard and deal a good chunk of damage with the downside being it throws your opponent away and gives them time to recover. I must say the game is very good with balance and gives you plenty of opportunities to turn a losing match into a winning one.

One downside to the fighting is that characters share a health and ability bar. Most of the time when playing you’ll have two or three characters but the fact that they all share health means that often you won’t need or want to switch characters. If each character had their own health and ability bars then you’d get to play through as each of them and although this would draw out combat and make it less fast-paced it would make the teams more meaningful and give each character a role in a fight.

Part of this fairness comes in the form of the awakening gauge. This gauge fills up slowly when you’re hitting your opponent and quickly when you’re taking hits, this means that you can use it as a ‘comeback’ mechanic to get your second wind. It boosts some of your attacks and speed whilst also allowing you to perform some devastating abilities called ‘awakening abilities’ these attacks deal a lot of damage and can help to even out the score. On top of this you have other more advanced techniques like area change attacks which hit the enemy into a different part of the stage and deals extra damage, but can only be done if the awakening gauge is above 50% and you hit the opponent with a full-charged smash. Other difficult techniques involve the counter’s which when you press the attack button or block button at the precise moment your struck you can perform a counter-attack or counter-evade respectively. To go one more level beyond you can also counter a counter and reverse it back.

Each character in the game, on top of having their own unique abilities, all fight differently. Some characters will have longer rush combo’s, some may have faster charging heavy attacks, some will resist certain damage types like slashing or fire damage better than others. Some may have more health than others, some characters will have close-combat abilities, others will have ranged abilities, many of them have a balanced mix of both. What I’m getting at here is that the forty characters currently in the game all feel and fight differently and it’s guaranteed that between all of the different fanbases playing the game that there will be at least one character that suits your playstyle or, at the very least, the abilities to make your custom character fight to your playstyle.

One of my biggest complaints has been the loading screens. The fact that they appear so frequently, such as when you want to edit your character’s outfit or when you need to watch a short two second cutscene before a fight, makes them a constant bugbear, luckily though a recent patch has shortened the loading time to about average now but they still seem to crop up too much. Another slight grievance was that despite the growing presence of English Dubbed anime and English manga growing in popularity the game only has the Japanese dialogue with some characters (looking at you Ryuk) have no dialogue at all. I get that it’s a minor detail since a lot of the fans for Jump Force will be familiar with Japanese dialogue but it wouldn’t be too hard to have some of the English voice actors lend their talent to this.

This game as I’ve found out is for those people then, the fans. I myself watch a lot of anime and my bookshelf seems to have a growing infestation of manga so despite all the things that I feel could have been better or improved I have to admit that I’ve enjoyed playing Jump Force. It’s focus on the fighting and the way that it handles combat like the old Dragon Ball Budokai Tenkaichi games that keeps me playing into the early hours. The matches are normally very quick and fast paced which means I find myself with that “just one more” attitude. Yes the story is flimsy and weak and the cutscenes look like a puppet show with invisible strings but at the end of the day it’s a crossover game, it’s non-canon for all the series involved and the whole thing has been made as a celebration. The strengths lie in that too though, I loved seeing some of the character interactions such as Luffy and Light Yagami having a conversation or JoJo and Seiya fighting side by side, it’s something that doesn’t normally happen and the fact that they’ve done a great job keeping all of the character’s personalities accurate and true means that you can enjoy all of those “what if” scenarios.

Jump Force is a game that is rough around the edges. They is plenty that could have been improved. But the stuff that matters, the fighting, the characters, the experience of having them all together in one game, all of that is perfect. And yes whilst I would of loved to have had more characters from each anime in the game, the level of individuality they’ve put into each character and the detail and depth they’ve put in to making them and how they move and fight is brilliant. There’s a definite sense of community about the game but I admit that might not be for everyone. But I finally have a game where I can have One Piece Vs. Dragon Ball, and that’s great.

BcT Review Rating: 7/10

Reviewed on the PS4