These natures (Knowledge, Strength, and Laughter) act in a Rock, Paper, Scissors relationship with Strength beating Knowledge, Knowledge beating Laughter, and Laughter beating Strength. Each battle panel comes with a certain nature. Help panels are one block panels that can give different boosts to characters they are placed next to. Support panels are two or three block panels that represent non-playable characters that can perform actions such as attacks, healing or status effects. They are based on various manga panels and are used to represent what kind of special attacks the characters have. Battle panels are four to eight block panels that represent playable characters. There are three kinds of panels that can be initialized in battle: Battle, Support, and Help panels, with decks needing at least one of each type and an assigned leader before being playable. Panels come in various shapes and sizes, taking up one to eight blocks. The bulk of the gameplay is based around using manga panels that represent characters to create decks on a four by five grid. The game boasts 305 characters (56 of which are fully playable) from 41 different Shōnen manga series. (No, there shouldn't.The game keeps many features from its predecessor, and adds many more. There should still have been a To Love-Ru world, though. And - most importantly - introduced me to Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo. I made a point of looking up every manga that vaguely interested me, which gave me some more appreciation of the medium.
The Jump series was eventually replaced by spiritual successor series One Piece Gigant Battle, but as good as those games are it's that big mash-up that really works for me. However, even in the patch, the post-game Jump Quiz mode is untranslated, making it a total guessing game. There's even a near-complete English translation patch, though it's perfectly playable in the original Japanese - you'll probaby need a guide to figure out some of the mission criteria, but otherwise it's all very self-explanatory. In practice I beat almost every mission in the game with the 6-panel Monkey D Luffy!
Larger, more powerful characters take up more space, so you need to balance your loadout carefully - well, in theory, anyway. You can also switch characters mid-battle, depending on who you have available in your "deck". Battles takes place between up to four competitors, with multiple rulesets and win conditions available, along with plenty of items to turn the tide of combat. Of course, the most popular series' such as Naruto, One Piece and Dragon Ball feature heavily, but the game moves through the worlds so quickly that you'll never get overfamiliar and bored.Īs for the actual fighting, it's certainly not as fast-paced and smooth as Super Smash Bros, but it's the best fighting game on the original DS. The main game sees you moving through space to different Jump-themed worlds, featuring manga as diverse as JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Dr Slump and Pyu to Fuku! Jaguar, representing Shonen Jump through the years.
I couldn't find any halfway acceptable Jump Ultimate Stars screens, so here's a picture from Jump Force, which is shit. Unlocking new characters etc in the original Super Stars required a confusing "manga construction" system which basically necessitated not only Japanese language skill, but extensive knowledge of Jump manga, while here it's been replaced by a much more coherent and traditional shop system using multiple types of gems to buy more "komas" - panels from manga, which can unlock new playable characters, support characters and myriad other items and features. Not only was it massively expanded, but it was much friendlier for importers like me. But the real stonker was its sequel, Jump Ultimate Stars, the kind of game you get once in a blue moon. The original pre-Z Dragon Ball. And of course, my favourite To Love-Ru.Īnyroad, I started reading One Piece recently because I remember liking what I'd seen of it, and it reminded me of playing Jump Superstars for DS back in the day, purchased on import after the UK Nintendo Official Magazine, in its good pre-Future Publishing years, praised it to the heavens as a delightful manga mash-up in the vein of Smash Bros.