Every now and again there is a game that is announced that just leaves people speechless, the J-Stars series is one such game, no one would have thought that the stars of Shonen Jump, a weekly manga publication, would ever get made, but it was even crazier to think it would release outside of Japan, but we have got the game and it's a blessing and a curse.

The game offers up a story, Jump World is a place where all the characters of the manga live and some of the characters are competing in the J Battle Festival, where they will get their wish granted. Players have the choice of playing through as one of four story arcs, each with a core cast of characters the player will interact with, The Motion story stars Luffy and Ace from One Piece and Seiya from Saint Seiya with the others being the Hope story staring Naruto, Yusuke and Gon, the Pursuit story starring Ichigo, Oga and Hiei and finally the Research story starring Toriko, Zebra and Goku.


I played the Motion story and was treated to the antics of Luffy, which was humours at times, strange the next, but fun overall. Anyone who knows the One Piece story knows that Luffy is aiming to be the Pirate King and winning the J Battle Festival will allow him to have his wish granted, Seiya on the other hand wants to use the wish to revive a dying star. While their motivations are different, they team up in order to win the battle, in order to enter the battle though they must first find all 3 pieces of a hero’s medal, which will require them to travel the world, seeking them out and fighting those who would get in their way. This is where things fall apart though.

The story makes sense and it is really the only way that the 32 different Jump series could be represented here, the problem is not with it as much as it is with the execution. All of the story elements are presented through very basic, static cutscenes, with the characters adopting a pose and a text box showing them speaking. They will fade out and fade back in with a different pose and occasionally say something random, but that is it, no full dialogue or animation is found here. There are also issues with the story snippets found on the map, as more text boxes will appear, providing hints or moments of levity, but the action pauses for great lengths, while they set something up. It is just a shame to see the potential of the characters wasted like this.


There is also a problem when it comes to playing the story, you are constantly being thrown into fights, which logic would dictate should not happen, but every time you enter a fight, it's the same line of dialogue from the characters, the same animation and I do mean every time. The amount of times I have heard Luffy exclaim he is going to be the Pirate King now is beyond crazy. The actual fighting though is really well done and can provide a lot of fun, for both casual and devoted players. When you have your enemy insight you can target them by locking onto them, allowing you to focus on the fighting and that is something you need to do.

Each of the characters in the game, 39 of which are playable in various ways, all have a variety of attacks and combinations that they can use, which means that when you play through the story as a set character, you will have a good understanding of that fighter, but swapping out to someone else will require some more learning. You have the standard light and heavy attacks, but you can also do some pretty cool attacks, but doing so will use up stamina, which is something you need to keep an eye on. Because without stamina, you will not be able to dash, doing powerful attacks or dodge all that successfully, but you can refill it at will, though doing so will leave you exposed to attacks.


The enemy you will face will throw a range of attacks at you, some are more up and close, others will cover a lot of ground, but being able to adapt to them all, especially as the roster of enemy combatants changes often, is crucial to winning. There was a fight that I attempted to win, by simply using my standard arsenal of attacks, but Zebra, the enemy I was fighting was so different to those I had fought by that time, I was taken out. Each of the fights from then on, proved to be more and more of a challenge, testing me to keep thinking about how to attack, which was harder on some than the others if I did not know the characters. After you deal damage to the enemy, you start to accrue power, which when you have collected enough, you can unleash massive attacks on the enemy, these are on rails sequenced, so once you start you need to see it through, but if your enemy is not in range of the attack, you will waste it.

Outside of fighting, you will take control of a ship as you navigate around the world, looking for the pieces, but sadly this is even worse than the story elements. You are unable to move the camera around, so when you are looking to go south in general, you won’t be able to see anything that is in your way, until you get really close and as the map has enemies that if you approach, will attack you, this is a really silly design choice. You are also not able to move around fast, you will get upgrades to your ship that allow you to fly, fire a cannon and such, but speed is nothing if not slow. Once you unlock the second level of flight, you can move over land easier, but going from one side of the map to the other is still slow as, something that irked me for some reason.


Outside of the main story, there are the standard Vs battle modes, where you can take the fight online or play locally to prove who the better fighter is; a card sub-game where you can earn cards to provide buffs to your fighters and a mode called Victory Road that will task you to take control of different fighters, win a battle, but also complete a series of challenges to get the best ranking possible. The only issue here is when you have two teams of almost identical line-ups on the screen at once, it can get quite confusing.  This mode feels, like something you would find in any modern fighting game and does shake up the challenges enough to keep it interesting and the character rotation is also pretty well balanced.

The presentation is mixed, it has two different visual styles that while they work ok on their own, clash in the game as whole. When in you are in any story element, you get hand drawn characters, but when you enter fighting, it's fully rendered characters and while you never see the two clash on screen at once, it can be quite a change to go from one to the other and back again. The problem with the rendered characters is they don’t show a lot of emotion in their intro and outro fight sequences, with some characters appearing stiff in their faces as they are meant to be speaking.

Speaking of audio, it is also a mixed back, the spoken dialogue is spot on for almost all of the characters, being portrayed by their anime voice actors, and some though were from before the anime’s existed and as such have different voices.  Hearing the same voices come from the same characters is really nice, but the issue with the sound is the music, a lot of it is brought from the series that the source material comes from and those work well, but the music on the map when you are travelling around the world is enough to make you turn the volume down, I know it made me do it. There is no English voice acting to speak of here and that is a good thing, the game is very much a product of Japan and placing any English audio onto it, would do nothing but hurt it.


J Stars Victory VS+ is a game made of fans of the manga they represent, pulling over 50 characters from over 30 series is no small feat, but the games creators have had a good try at it. The story is ok, but is dragged down by the way it is explained and the multiple visual styles are jarring, but if you are a fan of any of the series, you will enjoy seeing your favourite character taking on unexpected challenges.