3/5 ★ – Lammy's review of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All Star Battle R.

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: All Star Battle R post All Star Battle mode review - Morioh-cho radio! JJBA All Star Battle R is a remaster of a PS3-era JoJo's 2D fighting game. I am AWFUL at fighting games, especially traditional 2D ones. Say the words "quarter circle" or "dragon punch" to me and my eyes glaze over and your words become replaced by a faint buzzing. Regardless, I am a huge fan of JJBA so I picked it up based on the license. I mostly played the offline story mode for this review; I dabbled a bit in online but didn't dive too deep because 1) anyone still playing this game a few years after release will be so much better than me that it's not worth it and 2) the netcode is NOTORIOUSLY awful, especially for the Switch version I played. Its online mode generally considered almost unplayable on all consoles. So, the offline then. All Star Battle mode is... generously a campaign mode. It's really 112 fights with no story or context surrounding them. If you don't already know the story of at least the first 7 parts of JoJo, you WILL be lost. The fights take the form of canon fights from the story, "boss fights" against main villains that are in practice just slightly harder canon fights, and what if fights between warriors from multiple arcs or parts; again, the lack of any story context in all of these really weakens the experience, especially for the what ifs. The fighting mechanics themselves are... fine enough. I have some issues with the range on the light attack considering you cannot build a combo using your medium or heavy as a starter, but once you adjust it's very competent. The wildly diverse powersets of JJBA adapt themselves well to a fighting game, with every character feeling unique and complete to play. Each fight has between 2 and 5 "secret missions" to complete, each accomplished by performing some feat of skill like connecting with a particular move or winning a match without losing a round. Some of these are easy enough to grasp, while others feel pretty RNG-based and depend too heavily on what the AI decides to do. Overall, getting through 100% of everything was fun once I got the hang of the game, but the sheer amount of fights with nothing in between got to be a slog at the end. Taking that with the inconsistent netcode and I'm having to give this game about a 6.5 out of 10; it's fun enough for a dedicated JJBA fanatic with actual in person local friends to play with, but if that specific audience doesn't include you you won't get much out of this.