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The Lowdown
Pros: Tons of characters spanning dozens of anime series in one game
with a splendid manga styled battle system.
Cons: Actually using the koma system is quite testing and online play is
surely missed in Jump Superstars.
 Purchase
at Lik-Sang
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Jump Superstars had anime otaku on the edge of their seats since
Nintendo announced the title. There's good reason for it, since the game
features characters from a myriad number of Shounen Jump manga series.
Chances are your
favorite characters is probably in the game. From the shores of
One Piece with Luffy and crew to the tennis courts where Ryoma from
Prince of Tennis trains Jump Superstars has the widest selection of
anime characters ever. Out of the Dragon Ball universe there is Goku,
Vegtia, Gotenks, Bulma and Trunks. Straight from Konhoa are Nartuo,
Sasuke, Shikamaru, Kakashi and Rock Lee. Yugi takes a break from the
cards to jump in along with Bobobo. Sword wielders Ichigo (Bleach), Kenshin
(Rurouni Kenshin) and
Zoro (One Piece) are ready for battle. Even sports stars like Amakuni Saruno (Mr.
Full Swing) and Hanamichi (Slam Dunk) step in the ring. We could go and
spoil every single star in the game, but we think you get the idea of
how encompassing Jump Superstars is.Even with an all star cast,
battles between spirit detective Yusuke and Shaman King's star Yoh would
get boring if the gameplay didn't hold it's ground. Instead of calling
in Eighting, who's known for developing anime fighter games, Nintendo
partnered up with Ganbarion who developed some of the One Piece Fighting
games. Together, Nintendo and Ganbarion took the
Super Smash Brothers formula and scaled it down for the DS. You'll fight
on a 2D battlefield with up to four other characters on screen at any
time. The stages layouts aren't as large or unique as they are in Smash
Brothers. All of them have a few platforms to jump on with paper walls
that can be broken for ring outs. Unlike Smash Brothers you don't have
to throw characters out of the arena to win, dwindling down their health
also scores players points.
Battles in Jump Superstars are intense. A few hits by a well timed
combo will drain your health and your character's color. Players are
encouraged to block, do quick one button counters and even switch
characters out of battle. On the touch screen is a manga styled menu,
that lets you replace the character you're controlling by pressing on
another character's portrait. Since each character has their own life
bar, switching your team in and out is an essential strategy. The same
menu also lets you call in an ally to attack and even recover your life.
Whether a character can become a playable character or a support ally
depends on how many blocks of koma they use.
Unlike any other fighting game before it Jump Superstars has players
build a deck of animation frames called koma. The entire rectangular
grid can have up to twenty spaces of koma, but not all koma are the same
size. Some are one square and others take up seven. The size of the koma
ultimately determines what a character will do in battle. If you have
just a character's portrait, they will play the role of boosting you in
battle. These are things like healing, turning you invisible for a
second or increasing your speed. If you have a two or three frame koma
you'll be able to call in that character to do a super attack. For
instance if you use a partner koma with Sakura, she will jump in and
throw shiruken in all directions when you tap her on screen koma. Koma
that are between four to seven in size let you call that character
directly into battle. The size of the koma does vary the "strength" a
character has in battle, each different koma size lets you use different
special attacks. Also, the more koma a character takes up the more life
they have.
The koma system gives players lots of options, but it's not the
easiest thing in the world to use. It wouldn't be a problem if you just
had to set up your deck, but you actually have to put each koma together
before you can use them. You start out with two pieces, a character koma
and a serif koma, essentially a blank manga panel. To put together a useable koma you need to drag
the character koma into the blank manga panel. If you select combination,
the koma will get colored in and you can use it
in your deck. Sounds simple enough, but with so many different
characters and hundreds of blank manga panels there's a lot of
combinations to go through. Often the blank koma have hints, in Japanese
of course, like character quotes. However, unless you're familiar with
that series you just wont know where a character will go. This forces
players to resort to a FAQ for the easy way out or the arduous task of
trial and error. Nintendo does give players another option, pre-set koma
decks. If you just find the whole system to irritating or just want a
quick fight you can select some of the designed decks for the game. Be
aware though that you will be missing a lot of the game, dream combos
and even the chance to play as some characters if you don't build a
deck.
Now that you have your deck ready, you can jump in and battle.
Pressing "A" lets you jump, "B" does a light attack and "Y" does a heavy
attack. If you want to defend you can press "L" or "R" to block, but
beware of guard breaking attacks. The system is pretty balanced with a
lot to learn about stringing together your combos. You can do a basic
combo by starting out with a couple of light attacks and finish with a
heavy blow. If you want to get a little more technical you can end with
a super attack, like Goku's kamehameha blast or Kakashi's chidori. You
can also set up a dream combo, which brings together all your battle
characters for one ultimate attack. This can lead to some crazy
combinations like Yugi summoning the black magician while Naruto is
doing his sexy no jutsu. Or even more insane four characters unleashing
super attacks in a row. One final special move you can do is a
combination attack by having a set koma with two characters. This lets
you make all new attacks like Double Final Flash when you put Vegita and
Don Patchi together.
Fighting isn't the only way to win a round. Other than beating down
every other anime character in a blaze of glory there are other rule
sets to follow. Some matches have you compete to pick up power coins,
that are dropped when you smash barrels. Then there are some matches
where you compete to see who can break ten barrels the fastest. The
strangest challenge has you against the computer fighting to see who can
kick a treasure chest the most. You'll visit all of these challenges in
the single player J-adventure mode.
One of the biggest challenges fighting games face is making the game
entertaining as a single player experience. Handheld games suffer more
since there is no single set up to play with a friend, you're going to
need two systems and maybe two games just for a single fight. To make
Jump Superstars last longer there is an entire world to explore in the
J-adventure. This takes you across four different worlds in search of
battles and more importantly koma. Beating each mission earns you new
koma plus the ability to travel further in the Jump Superstars universe
to get more missions. Since each mission has multiple objectives and
multiple koma pieces, there is incentive to replay stages.
Even with good computer AI and the chance to set up all of those
crossover battles, you'll want to play with a friend. Jump Superstars
gives you two ways of doing this. If your buddy hasn't bought a copy of
Jump Superstars yet you can let them download the versus mode for
instant playability. Although, they can only use the koma you've
unlocked. If you and a friend each have your own copy of the game you
wont have to count on a single player to unlock all of the koma. Versus
mode is really where the game is at. When you have four players in a
match Jump Superstars rules, but you really have to ask yourself how
often is that going to happen. The single game download gives people a
chance to find people to play with, but it's no replacement for online
play.
You probably wont get as many two player bouts between
Jaguar Junichi and Jotaro as you would like, but Jump Superstars is
still a must pick up. The J-adventure mode will entertain for hours and
beyond that you can tweak your koma deck to perfection.
There's going to be a couple problems non literate importers are going
to have to face. First is figuring out mission objectives, that are in
Japanese. Second is understanding the koma system. Most of the koma have
Japanese captions, which are big hints at figuring out which character
belongs in the blank spot. If you ignore the koma system and just want
to fight you can play Jump Superstars. Although you can't really get all
of the experience the best parts of the game if you ignore making a
customized koma deck.
US Bound?
There is no uncertainty that this game would be a hot seller in the
US, so it would seem likely that Nintendo of America would bring this
over. However, due to licensing issues a lot of different publishers
(i.e. Atari, Bandai, Konami) will have to come to some kind of agreement
with Nintendo. Just because of legal issues between different companies
and a slew of unlicensed characters an American release seems doubtful.
Overall
Jump Superstars has so much more to it than just fighting. It's got a
unique set-up system with koma deck building and an entire world to
adventure through. If there was a must pick up game for the Nintendo DS
this is it.
This game was supplied by Lik-Sang.
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