Jump Ultimate Stars review

‘Jump! Ultimate Stars’ (JUS) is a dream come true for anime lovers everywhere. It basically brings together a vast number of franchises that originated in the Japanese magazine Shonen Jump and puts them all in one game. In simple terms ‘Jump! Ultimate Stars’ is the DS’s ‘Super Smash Bros Melee’ but instead of Nintendo characters you get to choose characters from animes such as Dragon ball, Naruto and Bleach. JUS is the sequel to the top selling import game Jump Superstars. JUS takes everything Jump superstars did and adds more in everyway. The main criticisms of Jump Superstars were that most of the arenas were a bit boring and the way that you had to unlock characters was unnecessarily complex. These faults have been rectified in the sequel.

The first thing that someone notices when they start playing Jump Ultimate Stars is the language barrier, JUS is a Japanese game, and it will never be released in the UK or the US for that matter. The game has over 20 animes represented within it, this game can only be sold in Asia due to different companies owning the rights to different franchises. Just think of how difficult it is for Nintendo to get Goldeneye on the virtual console now multiply the difficulty ten fold. If you are not prepared to consult Gamefaqs for help, you should probably leave this review right about now. The reason for this is that the main single player mode is mission based and all the objectives are in Japanese.Jump Ultimate stars has a way of selecting characters that’s quite unique to the series, before a player can enter a battle they must first create a deck. To do this they need to select Koma (the Japanese word for panel) and fit them into a 4x5 grid. Each Koma represents a character, Koma come in three types. The first type is Help Koma they take up one block of grid space and increase battle characters abilities, these range from resistance to status effects to an extra jump. The second types of Koma are support characters, these take up two to three blocks of space. These koma can be activated in battle to summon a specific character and perform a special ability that will usually damage the enemy or heal your character depending on which support is used. The third and final types of Koma are Battle characters these are characters that will be controlled for the majority of time and they take up 4+ blocks of space. The battles in ‘Jump Ultimate Stars’ take place on the top screen, the game usually involves four characters, fighting it out in a smash brosesque fashion. The deck that the player created earlier will appear on the bottom screen, this allows for canging characters just by touching the screen. The developers understood this could become unintuitive if the player had to keep look at the bottom screen so they have included the option to set shortcuts to different Koma through use of the L and R buttons, this is especially useful when it comes to the activation of relatively small support Koma. The main difference between this and ‘Smash bros.’ is that there are more ways to win. In Jump Ultimate Stars the characters have HP so they can be KO’d by depleting that or they can be knocked out of the arena. There are also status effects to worry about such as confuse which reverse the controls on the d-pad or poison which slowly decreases a characters HP. Another factor to consider is that there are three types of character in this game knowledge, power and laughter. Laughter does more damage to power, power does more damage to knowledge and knowledge does more damage to laughter. Jump Ultimate Stars has a lot of depth in the battle system it employs far more than Smash Bros. melee.

The main single player mode is called the J-Universe and it’s basically the games story mode. This is where a large number of the games characters can be unlocked. It starts off with a quick tutorial on how to play, once you’ve learnt how to throw a punch and unleash a special move you will be transported to one of many J-galaxies (groups of planets, each planet represents a different anime). Each of the planets has different missions revolving around a different anime for example one of the missions on the dragon ball planet is to collect all the dragon balls and another is to KO all opponents. When a planet is selected for the first time a short opening sequence will appear in the form of some comic book styled scenes from the anime chosen. Generally the missions revolve around collecting something, knocking someone out or surviving. These missions have a main objective and 4 or 5 secondary objectives, completing the primary objective allows the player to move onto the next mission but completing the secondary objectives leads to more characters and gems(JUS currency) being unlocked.

I can’t really comment on this games story as I’m still not entirely sure what the hell was going on even after finishing the J-universe, all I know is that an evil professor did something evil and it’s your job to save the day.New characters are unlocked using the J-universe mode but they are evolved using another mode called J-evolution. In this mode the player gets to acquire upgraded versions of a character. All the characters in this game are unlocked as just help koma from this stage some can become support characters and others can become battle characters. This is done by buying new Koma using gems obtained from defeating opponents. This is not the only purpose of J-evolution however as there are some secret planets in J-universe which can only be obtained after upgrading a character in J-evolution.

The other big attraction this game has is the large number of multiplayer features. It includes DS download play which is its weakest multiplayer component so I’ll get that over with first. DS download play allows you to play with up to 4-players but it gives all players preset decks and there not very good decks. Jump Ultimate Stars has however one of the best online components of any DS game. It’s got what DS owners have come to expect a worldwide match finder and friend battle. It also has voice chat before battles and the ability to store decks that rivals were using. The best option is friend battles as you can set out rules before as like most online games there are people who abuse certain cheap techniques.

Jump Ultimate Stars graphics aren’t showstoppers but they get the job done. They are all well designed 2d sprites and the amount of action that occurs on screen at once is at times amazing. The price of all this action is some lag from time to time. This can be annoying in a four way online battle at times but its not game ruining. The levels are well designed but the backgrounds could be of a higher quality. They look nice but there is not much going on. The music does the job but isn’t very memorable and after 36 hours It does start to get a bit annoying. Apart from that this is a near perfect game and there’s unlikely to be a better game of this type to appear on DS unless a sequel appears on the horizon. If your going to import just one game make it this one.