J-Stars Victory VS+ is a crossover fighting game for the Vita, PS3 and PS4. It was an unlikely release given it features characters from many different manga series, so presumably licensing would have been difficult. Nevertheless, it was able to be released in English and features in its roster characters that had appeared in the Weekly Shonen Jump magazine. The game features a single-player story mode, with four routes. Unfortunately, the only major difference between those four routes are the playable characters you use, therefore, play through it once and it’s not really worth it to play through the others. It tries to be a fully fledged story mode with RPG elements, including sidequests, gaining items, fighting “random” enemies, and accumulating experience points to level up. It’s all fluff though since all quests are either battles (which you do enough already) or finding an item from somewhere.
The story takes place in Jump World, which is an open sea with continents, and on those landmasses are familiar iconic places from various source materials. It’s quite cool when you recognise those places, until you realise it is basically a static image and that’s it. You’ll end up controlling a ship that eventually gets upgraded but it sounds cooler than it is, because once the initial amazement wears off, you’ll realise it’s a bland open world style with nothing much to do. There are enemies that roam around and they are annoying. You do enough battles already without being forced into more. The story itself is weak. Fighting games are not known for their stories but this one still manages to disappoint. It’s told in a visual novel style but without any of the flair or charms. Dialogue has limited voiceovers (mainly just random phrases), and the character portraits barely have different expressions. With your chosen character, they find themselves in this world wanting to travel and battle in the Jump Battle Tournament. Before you get into the tournament, they’re end up travelling around battling heaps of others. It’s a flimsy excuse and dialogue feels really repetitive.
The story drags on by giving you an item to fetch, only for the characters to realise that they need another item first, before finding out they need another item before that. It’s tedious and boring, and the worst part are the fetch quests, which do not show on the map. So now you have to try and remember where a particular landmark or city is… but you cannot pull up a map in-game to show you. All of this leads to a repetitive and frustrating experience. Even if you get past the sidequests being mind-numbingly boring, there are several cheap ones such as when you start off a battle with 1 hit point while your opponent is at full health. It’s not a massive problem until you realise that your AI partner also has 1 HP. They will then proceed to rush headlong against the enemy and end up causing you to lose the battle again and again. This just emphasizes the extremely poor design of the overall game. This further translates into partner battles as your AI can be so incompetent sometimes that they cause you to lose the battle and it’s better if you had the ability to fight alone. Unfortunately, you cannot skip cutscenes so if you die, you have to go through the dialogue again.
All this can be forgiven if the gameplay was good but like everything else in the game, the glamor wears off around ten minutes. It’s a 3D brawler and characters have a weak attack, strong attack, various special moves, can guard, jump, dash and block. It utilizes all four corners of the Vita’s touchscreen to make up for the fact that it doesn’t have R2 / R3 / L2 / L3 buttons. All in all, it’s pretty standard but the biggest flaw of the game is how clunky the controls are. Dashing, jumping and guarding requires start up animation and you cannot cancel moves, so everything feels slightly delayed. There’s not enough variety and nuance to the combo system to stop you from just mashing attack as you end up relying on specific combos. The enemies in story mode are usually easy and lacks challenge. The way the game tries to increase the difficulty is to have the enemy do big chunks of damage, or have the AI gang up on you. This is because battles can have up to three characters per team, plus a support character each (who you can summon to do additional independent damage). You can set one of four preset behaviors for your teammates such as focusing on attacking or defending. You win a battle but KO’ing characters a set number of times. It’s annoying when during the story, the game forces you to use another character as you would not be too familiar with their movesets.
The story doesn’t take too long if you skip all the pointless sidequests and random battles. It is around 3-5 hours long, however, it is extremely tedious and it is terrible if you want to even consider playing it four times. The four different arcs are all basically the same, but using different playable characters. This feels just like the rest of the game: half-baked and bursting with filler. The story is so bad, because it is extremely basic and even the interactions and cameos of characters from the various franchises end up feeling disconnected, losing its novelty very fast. The graphics are another area that’s disappointing. While the character models can be forgiven and their low amount of detailing can be attributed to a stylistic choice, the environments are really bad. They are blocky and noticeably lacks texture, it’s to the point of being distracting. The one good thing with the game is how it pulls characters from more obscure source material like To Love-Ru and even Luckyman!
Once you’re finished with the story, or given up on playing it four times with little differences between each playthrough, there are a few other modes to try out. There is Victory Road, which is basically pitting you battle after battle as you progress through a map of the continent, so yes, it’s similar to story mode but without the travel between each battle. There is an online mode where you can battle against other characters. Lastly, the game uses cards as a type of power up for your characters, and collecting these requires you to grind battles to gain points to buy random cards, this will take up a lot of time. Overall, J-Stars Victory VS+ has a good premise, a crossover of some of the most recognizable anime ever? Surely it’ll be amazing. Unfortunately, while we get a decent character roster, the developers didn’t do a great job at the actual gameplay. The fighting mechanics are dull and boring, and tacking a tedious and repetitive story mode on top doesn’t do it any favors either. It is definitely fun for the first fifteen to thirty minutes but once the novelty of playing as some of your favorite characters wears off, there’s really little left of the game that’s going to keep your attention.
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