DO-DO-DO-DO-DO-DO-WWRRRRYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!
In these last few years, it's been the trend for game designers to include
whoever they damn well please in fighting games, mixing and matching
franchises and hauling out every pirate, ninja, robot, dinosaur, and zombie
that's ever been put in a game, ever. The weird thing is it's almost always
a good idea. This month's lucky winner is Jump Super Stars! For those
unfamiliar with it, Shonen Jump is a digest of Japanese manga series, read
weekly by pretty much everyone in Japan, home to famous series like Naruto,
Dragonball, and many, many more. Now available in crazy tag-team fight game
flavor!
As is the word on the Internet, Jump Super Stars contains about three
hundred million characters. The catch is, though, most are only summon-able
support characters. Still, there are 34 main battle characters. Each manga
series represented has between zero and five battle characters. DBZ and One
Piece get five battle characters each, but poor Prince of Tennis has none! I
hope you like support characters if you're a big fan of Prince of Tennis,
ahahahahah!
Building teams ("decks") of characters is done with a spiffy in-game
interface and ten save slots for teams (and ten more for downloading teams
from other DS systems). With a 5x4 grid page, the player can lay out any
sort of comic page they please with the character panels they have. A basic
help character takes just one square - any character, or even non-character
like a Sensu bean, can be a help character. Support characters take two or
three spaces. They actually show up on screen and launch an attack or give a
huge present or do whatever it is they do in the manga. Now, character
panels sized four-squares and up are the main battle characters that will be
doing the duking-out. Each deck requires at least one of each kind, and
there's no reason not to fill it up to maximum, as each character in it
gives you additional super meter capacity (it starts full, too).
Experimentation helps build really good decks. Depending on the player's own
tastes and abilities, they might opt to squeeze in four battle characters or
just one or two with really good super moves and an army of help characters
to power them. Also hidden away in the game are three special panels with
big, flashy kanji (representing friendship, victory, and effort). Stick
these together between two character panels and they can do a special Super
Tag move. Finding the good ones is an incredible pleasure for the fanboy
type. C'mon, Rasengan Spirit Bomb!
Of all the characters in the game, the player starts with roughly zero
percent of them. They are collected by moving through the single-player mode
(and the extra goals along the way). Characters are discovered in their base
element, single-panel help characters. The support and battle character
panels are earned without characters actually in them - only a silhouette
and voice balloon can be seen. Now, if you know the characters well enough
to match them with their quotes in Japanese, no problem. If not, well, be
prepared to spend up to a couple hours crunching panels looking for matches.
A small fraction of the characters are visible in the game's sample decks
and in screenshots in the manual. Still though, systematically going through
the remainder takes quite a bit of time.
On the subject of deck making, decks can be traded wirelessly with other DS
systems. For playing multiplayer with a single cartridge, decks for all the
players need to be arranged ahead of time, which is a bit of an
inconvenience. Passing around the DS to build teams for everyone cuts into
valuable beating-guys-up time! However, if everyone has a cartridge, they
can sort out their decks on their own and get down to business.
Multiplayer modes are fairly staple free-for-all modes; survival (last guy
standing) and time (most points wins). In the single-player adventure mode,
some other missions show up, like "avoid getting hit," "punt the treasure
chests," and "destroy all the walls/barrels/chances of ever having a
girlfriend by playing weird Japanese games all the time." Single player mode
has a conquest-mode-like map with a series of missions and a few hidden
paths when enough of the game is cleared. Some of the mission objectives are
not particularly obvious, especially early on. Fortunately, caring is
sharing, and href="http://www.planetgamecube.com/specials.cfm?action=profile&id=570">guides exist
After unlocking a few characters, taking them for a spin is a real pleasure.
The control in Jump Super Stars is simply awesome. Using the touch screen to
deploy moves is incredible in its dependability and flexibility. Characters
have a pretty good variety of moves, at least on par with Smash Bros., and
they even get new move-sets when they get a bigger panel. Battle character
panels can be four to seven squares in size, and the bigger the panel, the
tougher the character is, generally. This feature is a little bit similar to
Capcom vs SNK 2.
"Dream combos" can be chained by touching any sequence of battle characters
on the screen (starting with the current character, starting an attack chain
instead of switching), and help & support characters and "Super Tag" moves
are deployed in a single touch. During an intense fight, it's probably best
to use both thumbs (depending on how the panels are laid out) and dial a
back-and-forth combination. The pace of dream combo inputs is roughly the
same as Killer Instinct auto-doubles, for those familiar with it. Most
characters do a few hits at a time. With battle character panels at least
four blocks in size, it's tough to mess up dream combos or character
switches. They can be buffered, too, for fast follow-ups and a lot of
potential for advanced combos. The only possible drawback to the controls is
that the screen tends to get a bit dirty from slapping your thumbs on it.
Not a big problem, just wipe it off every now and then.
The characters themselves feature plenty of their signature moves, quotes,
and general style. There are no voiceovers (nor are there in real manga!)
but voice bubbles appear on screen. It's all Japanese, of course, but it's
accurate and still looks really cool. Sprites are fluidly animated, and even
non-symmetrical characters are drawn differently when they face left and
right. Plenty of special animations have been drawn for Super Tag attacks,
too. Nice touches, all around. Many of the various manga series have their
own special battle arenas. Naruto nerds may recognize the two giant statues
and the waterfall. Others are a bit generic, though. Gameplay-wise, the only
differences between arenas are the shape and positions of pits and
platforms.
Here lies the final paragraph where a summary of all prior information is
crunched into advice on a buying decision. It's not an easy leap to spend
like, fifty bucks on a portable game where the only English phrases are the
title of the game and occasionally, "WWRRYYYYYYYYY," but it's worth it for
those who like good fighting games, at least a couple of the featured
franchises, or for those who would like to hold onto their status as king
nerd among the other toiling serf nerds with their pedestrian, domestic
games. It's good enough to be the Smash Bros. of the DS, so if there's a
core group of fight-game buddies around, it's definitely worth getting.
Click here
to order Jump Super Stars from Lik-Sang! Hey, free shipping, too!
(Disclaimer: owning this game is not actually a status symbol.)