J-STARS Victory VS+ ROM Screenshots

J-STARS Victory VS+ ROM Description

Introduction

On March 19, 2014 J-Stars Victory Vs arrived with a special game which would commemorate the 45th anniversary of Shonen Jump magazine, a game with great expectations behind it that only perhaps could have been bettered for many what Jump Force lacked.

Game Modes

J-Stars Victory Vs is the fifth crossover game from Jump magazine counting the Battle Stadium which we already talked about in a previous video, the Jump Superstars on Nintendo DS among some others. This title was released for the first time with the name of Project Versus J in 2012 and arrived for the PlayStation 3 console and surprisingly also for Sony’s portable console of the moment the PS Vita, versions which have certain distinctive characteristics that are not very relevant besides of course the graphic level.

J-Stars features an adventure mode that acts as the narrative starting point of the game. This is divided into different arcs with unique leaders such as Naruto, Luffy, Toriko, and Ichigo. In these arcs of J Adventure the plot is presented in the form of subtitle dialogue using the original footage from the anime for this point, an element pretty used in games of this kind.

It is a story that revolves around an ultimate tournament that brings together all the most important fighters of Shonen Jump magazine. This tournament has characteristics beyond just consecutive battles. The navigation system by levels is using a small ship to go from island to island facing known enemies and gathering members in our group. This makes a lot of sense because of the combat system that J-Stars sets up.

The ship is constantly upgraded to be able to carry more people, move faster and even float above mainland while circulating through these waters there are many known locations from different universes such as the Kame House, the Trap Tower, even the Knockout Stream. These are very well thought additions that bring light and color to the environment.

In addition, the developers were concerned that the characters that we are recruiting at least have interaction between them on the journey, a factor that helps the fact that they are together to fight not feel forced. Honestly I think that both with the wings as well as the spontaneous interactions of the characters and elements placed in the form of homage to the manga’s anime was what I enjoyed the most in the game because I would like each of the adventure arcs to be they choose if they had different stories or objectives beyond just participating in the tournament with different teams.

Also it’s not like you can participate with your own custom team you should always use the same teams that the game imposes on you. As for the story of the tournament it’s not that I was expecting too much however I feel that the arguments for the fighters to end up fighting are very generic. I think something better could have happened to them. In any way they enter directions of the characters have a certain charisma and they are things that we can say we can let go of for this reason.

It is tempting to simply hit the button to skip the character’s dialogues after a certain point because you know that the only purpose of the conversation is going to agree on a fight. Luckily they will give you useful information to improve your skills or find useful items.

In Road to Victory mode you simply have to overcome a series of battles in sets of scenarios until you complete all the challenges, a game mode already used enough in the genre. The store offers the possibility of buying the remaining characters of the cast directly in addition to supporting characters since there are some that cannot be used as main ones. In the store you can also buy improvements for the adventure ship J and boxes that contain letters which are used to improve the qualities of the fighters you want.

Up to this point everything is predictable within what can be expected from an arcade game combining the most important characters of the Jump universes and then it comes as much. Don’t expect to find any super deep mechanics, a polished combat system for the online experience, no everything could be summarized as an absolute fun service but fan service that offers what it promised to be.

Combat System

I know many think that this game is infinitely better than Jump Force even though I agree that the game is a shame I don’t see it far from this one, to be honest and that’s thanks to this gameplay. Let me explain, look we are not going to lie making a story an adventure mode where the plot has a good end goal at Disney character development and everything makes sense in a game that combines more than 15 different universes is practically an impossible task. I’m not going to resent you for that reason even though its story seems to me insanely boring it is a factor that you see coming from a far away even just by seeing its cover.

But if you are at least going to make its mechanics and game system not the most balanced in the world but at least entertaining, make you want to fight again I gladly accept it so are the great most of games based on anime that do not represent the canon story directly if they gameplay has factors of demand replayability and addiction that gives you a great point in favor above many titles of the same kind.

But it turns out that this game is a waste of fan service which I think is good using it in a moderate way that is not the case here. I don’t want to sound like a hater because I like this game a lot. I had a good time playing to pass the time however its fighting mechanics leave a lot to be desired in my opinion.

First this is not a classic fighting format or an arena fighter either it is a mix of sandbox with arcade fighting elements which makes sense but not when the skills of each character have such an abysmal difference between them all. The fights begin with the task of finding your rival and fixing him with your camera to have a face-to-face fight. As a consequence of that the scenarios of advice are much wider than one could expect but that brings another thing, the camera and angulation of the game gives a lot of problems when trying to find a single target in the middle of a bite of 6 at the same time and you feel like you cannot move as you like.

Each character has a light attack, a strong attack, a jump, a special attack with three variations, a grab, a range attack, and an ultimate. You have a stamina bar that tells you how much you can block attacks, dashing percentage of use of special powers, etc. These are three-on-three fights which means you can do support attacks too. Now that sounds good but if it wasn’t for the hitboxes in this game that were poorly executed. The block stuns are also exaggerably bad implemented which causes a combat system in which you cannot measure with science what a strategy the way to approach a rival is the correct one in certain cases.

There are some times where a support attack can be chained with a normal combo that is a basic to learn format but on other occasions rivals can be intangible and have invincibility frames by the moment they touch the ground after an attack that is supposed to have them down. That is the attacks can have a completely random reaction on the rival’s animations at the moment the game wants to. A part of the bug that may occur in cases where special attacks that are activated that connect more than one hit and the rival can be shot to one side of the field for no reason.

The ultimate activates when your meter here is maximum you enter a special state and then you must land the final hit and I’m just saying if they thought to make a combat system so shallow and with so many favors what was the need to make the ultimate of all the characters so conditional that it was so flourished if in the end your game is screaming fun service these are things that in a fighting game or at least in a cold arcade cannot be allowed.

Conclusion

But to finish with the first relevant information about the game, the cast of characters is quite wide as it was to be expected, 52 characters from universes of Dragon Ball, One Piece, Naruto, Hunter x Hunter, YuYu Hakusho, Assassination Classroom, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, Bleach among others. The game is graphically enriched, it is attractive with attractive colors and visual effects, it has an element of destruction of the scenarios that I think is pretty decent and outstanding despite not being the most detailed we have seen.

The power levels are relatively well implemented, Luffy can practically crash my game at a certain point. The game actually had a good receive and with a very considerable amount of sales from even outside Japan including all platforms. In my personal conclusion, J-Star’s Victory is a game that offers a lot of content, tons of fan service, good graphics for the time but falls short in implementation ideas according to the gameplay.

This is the same thing that happened to Jump Force, it is graphically impressive yes it has good ideas yes but its integration to the gameplay is difficult. The combat system is imbalanced, conditioned, kinesthetically unpleasant and in general a blank experience. By the way we will talk more in depth about Jump Force in the future but even being a game with such low reviews J-Star seems to seem about the same and to a some extent I am surprised that those of Spike Chunsoft are continuing to make the same mistakes four years later.