The voting window is closed! All followers for the characters entered into the ASB League are now tallied, and the showcase of the COM fights will begin in two days. So who ended up winning?

I don’t know how I ever doubted him. DIO is the most popular character as is the way of things. He’s followed pretty closely by Johnathan, though, which I legitimately didn’t expect. Josuke was a good lock on third. It was a struggle between the top 5, but the final rankings put Bruno a few hundred behind Josuke and Johnny a few hundred behind him. Then there’s a huge drop to Caeser at sixth before the rankings start to become close again.

The importance of the ranking thing, other than it being a big popularity contest, is the tournament brackets. The easiest way I can think to describe it is like the World Martial Arts Tournament in Dragon Ball. Every character will be put into blocks of four or five for preliminary matches. Those prelim matches will determine who gains a place in the final brackets. In this case there are 16 slots to fill of two on two matches. The top three characters in the supporter race are seeded and don’t have to fight preliminary matches. That leaves 13 slots left for the remaining 26 characters to fight over. That means that half the remaining characters will be lost at the prelim stage.

But the big point of all of this is showcasing the gameplay. It will be COM matches, but they will be real matches instead of just demo moves against what are probably dummy opponents like what we’ve seen in the PVs. Every character will get showcased through tons of battles on the official UStream channel. Streaming starts on Wednesday the 19th at 9PM JST. For me, that’s 7AM, but UStream tends to keep recordings of streams in the channel’s library, so the fights should hopefully be available even after the matches are over.

Get ready for a brawl, everyone. We’re going to get a real taste of just what it is this game can do!

And we’re off on a long series of matches. They decided to start everything off with an exhibition between the top 4 characters, 1st vs. 2nd and 3rd vs. 4th. That’s why Johnathan, Dio, and Josuke are fighting despite them being automatically placed into the final 16 because they got so many votes.

Anyway, we’re getting our first look at the gameplay. These are CPU only matches, so the balance and mechanic functionality may change when human players start getting control.

Bruno vs. Josuke was pretty nice. Good exchanges leading to a pretty even match. Bruno’s dash looks like it’ll be hard to use since if your opponent doesn’t jump or recover from an attack that goes over you, they’re in a pretty good position to punish the move. I’m glad that we got to see the stands going at each other. From the looks of it, it seems to last a set time, and whoever has the advantage at the end of that gets the free hit. Bruno’s get up at the end of the match he’s losing did happen, though it happened so fast I almost didn’t notice it at first. It doesn’t look as troubling as I feared, but the amount he gets back is still a little more than I think would be ideal.

Johnathan vs. Dio is a little more telling. Johnathan at the end managed to get a small rally, but it looked like, without a stand, he was getting pretty stomped. Dio was able to keep him at bay pretty well by just attacking with The World. It also didn’t look like it was particularly difficult to land the Road Roller skill, though that could be due to CPU not having to do difficult button inputs. I’m hoping that it’s a fluke and that stand user vs. non-stand user won’t typically create that problem. It doesn’t affect the majority of characters, but it would be kinda lame.

This is just the first match. They haven’t announced when the next one will be, so keep an eye on the UStream channel for the most up to date matches and Nico, YouTube, and here for the match recordings.

Edit:

There’s also a short video of Okuyasu and Rohan demoing together that was part of an ASB livestream. I think it speak for itself.

That’s Jotaro delivering the character cards to one of the hosts. It’s so satisfying when he says “ORA” while putting the box on the table.

Somebody on Nico was nice enough to record and upload the full first episode of the ASB League Stream. It’s about 45 minutes, and you can view it through Polsy. If it ends up on YouTube, I’ll embed it then. Unlike what I thought, the stream is a full on show where three guys discuss ASB while also playing the fights. That’s part of why it’s so long even though there’s only the two.

The big reveal is all the preliminary groups have been drawn. That’s what our dear Jotaro is carrying in that box. They were drawn at random into 6 groups, A through F. A through D have four fighters, E and F have five fighters. The top two fighters from each group will be taken into the final brackets except for group F. To fully fill out the 16 slots, the top three will be taken from F. Here’s the full list.

Group A
Bruno Buccelatti, Mohammad Abdul, Hol Horse, Johnny Joestar

Group B
Jotaro Kujo, ACDC, Jean-Pierre Polnareff, Caeser A. Zeppeli

Group C
Yoshikage Kira, Wham, Rohan Kishibe, Will A. Zeppeli

Group D
Gyro Zeppeli, Jolyne Kujo,  Giorno Giovana, Koichi Hirose

Group E
Joseph Joestar, JoJolion Josuke, Hermes Costello, Narancia Ghirga, Akira Otoshi

Group F
Okuyasu Nijimura, Noriaki Kakyoin, Diavolo, Cars, Guido Mista

Each group has them discuss someone in the group’s popularity as well as reading a tweet from one of their cheerers. It’s fun to see all this fandom bandied around.

The exhibitions are over. The next streams are going to be determining who has a chance to be the top character of All Star Battle. Our next fighting group will be Group A, so who are you placing bets on? If Hol Horse and Johnny can use their range effectively, I think they’re pretty suited to moving onto the top 16, and Hol Horse more than Johnny. Then again, Bruno has a move that perfectly sets him up to deal with projectiles which sets him up to do well against everyone else. This’ll be fun.

(Thanks for posting the video to JoJoF2C. You can also watch it there if you prefer it to Polsy.)

There’s been another manga comparison’s video uploaded to Nico, this time for the 5th preview video. It gives you a real appreciation for the amount of work that was put into just studying the source material. I imagine a whole room of CC2 interns having to skim decades of manga to make sure that the arm position on Narancia’s taunt in just right.

That said, what really impresses me with this comparison is the attention to detail on facial expressions.

Though this one stands out because I’m disappointed I didn’t realize the bubble shield would be based on the shaving scene

And I just think Bruno kicking Josuke in the balls is funny.

You can watch the whole video here.

(Thanks to the JoJo thread for posting this)

Lots of things going on in JoJo video land. We can start with one of the bigger ones.

You may have already gotten to see this. This is the trailer for the first episode of JoJo’s Kitchen, a cooking show staring Hirohiko Araki. That guy next to him is Yuusei Matsui, the guy who writes Assassination Classroom. I’m not sure if Matsui is his permanent co-host, if this were to go beyond one episode, or if they’ll rotate in other Jump authors. I’d love to see Mitsutoshi Shimabukuro storm the set and try to take the show by force.

Lesser known but still of note, this is a live match between two members of who look like an idol group on a morning variety show On Demand Mornings. I don’t recognize the girls themselves, but we’ve got an actual live match of people playing ASB. There’s no real substance to their playing style since they wouldn’t know anything about the game, as you can tell by the one playing Josuke using the tried and true amateur fighting method of jumping around like a jackass, but it’s cool to see what people playing the game is like. There was a tournament bracket set behind the hosts, so there might be more of these waiting to be uploaded.

Finally, ever seen “Vaguely Recalling Jotarou’s Bizarre Adventure?” It’s a short web series where a guy tries to describe parts of Stardust Crusaders from memory with his little doodles to help visually. It’s pretty funny, and now it’s in English. This YT Channel, Mitler25, has been uploading them since a few weeks ago starting with Episode 3 and is up to Episode 14. There’s something that tickles me about jokes like, “Jotaro started to fight Polneraff, but then he stopped because this was actually Abdul’s fight.” There’s also the little bonus gags like Dio and Little Giorno standing outside Polnareff’s room with an umbrella. Give it a look.

So this is what everyone was praising so much. Yeah, it’s pretty good. I’m always up for jazzy music like this. The visual in the very beginning part with all the protagonists is fantastic. It is as though they watched the anime OPs and said, “We can do that. We already have the models anyway!” The style is emulated pretty well and looks very good. I do love the little detail that Tusk opens the way to the next part of the intro by prying open the walls just like in Johnny’s fight with Valentine. Joseph twirling the JoJo Crackers is always fun. Giorno gets a little glossed over. He’s there with his pose, and then suddenly Jolyne. The intro of the main villains is pretty nice. Seven over all, meaning that Dio gets to go twice, and the darker colors spilling in was a really nice aesthetic touch. And then it’s just everyone kicking some ass. Not a bad way to do it.

I know this isn’t the highest quality version just yet. I’ll replace it if another one comes along or if this one gets taken down. Ten more days, and a lot of you may just have the ability to watch it whenever you want. I take it anticipation is high right now.

(Thanks for mentioning the video in the comments, SStefania)

Not much longer now. In commemoration, JoJo’s fandom is going crazy. One crazy is that someone dug up and brought together all the manga comparisons videos for the PVs we’ve missed. I’ve posted the videos for PVs 4 and 5 before, so now we get PVs 2, 3 and 6.

They’re Nico, so I need to link them. Each of the pictures links to the video.

PV 2

This video has comparisons for Wham, Giorno, Mista, and Joseph, and most Joseph. He takes up most of the end of the video with his unique track. Each of these videos contains different music than normal. The ones from before I remember only having “Roundabout.” Some of these use them, but also other tracks. Wham, Giorno and Mista are all played over “Get Back” by The Beatles, but Joseph is played over “Eat It” by Weird Al.

I’m impressed with working in the soda shot. Giorno’s poses are taken a lot from volume covers. Wham and Mista have some interesting ones, but we’ve seen Mista before. It makes me happy to see the very smiley Pistols, though. They are so happy riding those bullets. You also get to see a few comparisons beyond the manga with Joseph’s sprite from the Part 3 game and some models from the Part 5 game.

PV 3

This is when you really get to see that the comparisons aren’t just to the original manga. It says “OVA Version Respect?” so it’s not confirmed, but the comparison is easy. It’ll more obvious when you see it in motion in the video.

The video contains the comparisons for Polnareff, Kakyoin, Josuke, Okuyasu, Abdul, Hol Horse, and Dio. The other characters get “Roundabout,” as per normal, bu Dio gets his own in “Lock Up the Wolves” by, who else, DIO. You start getting a lot more of the sprites in this one since we have so many people in the Part 3 game here. Also, watching Okuyasu getting hit in the face by a flowerpot is still funny.

PV 6

That picture doesn’t work as well if it isn’t a .gif. It says, “Is the motion respect for the Part 3 game?” So, again, there’s no definite confirmation, but man does it look similar. One other detail that’s nice is that the texture on Dio’s eyes does that flowery splitting before shooting the beam. Very nice detail.

This video contains the comparisons for Phantom Blood Dio, Rohan, Kira and Kosaku Kira, Koichi, Otoshi, and Enrico. On top of possibly pulling from the Part 3 game, we also see a lot of other pulls from places like the between chapter doodles, an album that Killer Queen posed on once apparently, and Otoshi’s jumps being based on general guitarist jumps including one used specifically by Eddie Van Halen. Very cool.

Oh, and if you’re looking for a little more Rohan, there is also this other comparison video made by someone else in a different style. It compares a few of the other same points, but also goes into the referenced dialogue as well as poses. It uses a few songs. “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” by Bob Dylan, some Boyz II Men song I don’t know, and “Dream Police” by Cheap Trick. It’s a cool video.

Three days. Just a little more push, and we’re good to fight!

The eternal struggle of a man and his surrogate brother/new body’s great great grandson. ASB League’s final match comes down to one of the most iconic struggles in JoJo, and there’s lots of fists and a few knives. AI Dio really doesn’t know how to handle his time stop power. Jotaro starts off all right, but he goes for the heavy ORAORA for a while. It does him all right here and there, but Dio’s pretty good for getting inside the wall of fists, and that’s why he’s the King of JoJo. I’m still hoping for a crowning ceremony.

Just for fun, lets get a few hands on demos going. Iggy and Fugo were announced not even that long ago, so a PV and a demo were in order. This isn’t so much a match as a messing around with the two, but you get to see some of the characters’ moves. To compensate for Iggy’s height, it looks like he just has a hitbox bigger than his body. Fugo’s landing hits in the air above Iggy’s head, but that seems reasonable so you don’t have to crouch during the whole match against him. The Fool makes it a little more obvious, so it may be that the hitbox is based on Iggy with The Fool out since you’re likely to fight with it on anyway.

I finally manage to not guess traps on a character, and he uses them. Fugo gets the ability to put down clouds of his virus. Due to the low quality of the video and that it happens at the very end, I can’t really tell the kind of damage it does. It looks like it turns your health bar purple, and that happened to Fugo and Iggy. Not hurting yourself with that could be an issue.

Finally, let’s have a full on exhibition. Two matches for fun between voice actors, let’s say. These two matches are played by the character’s voice actors, Kazuyuki Okitsu (Johnathan) vs. Wataru Hotano (Josuke), and Hermes vs. Mitsuaki Madono (JoJolion Josuke.) Only Hermes is played by someone else being played by Kendo Kobayashi.

I love seeing these player matches. It’s almost like the game runs at a higher speed when there’s real people playing it. Johnathan vs. Josuke is especially fun. The combos the two pull of, the fluidity of how the combat moves. The combos the pull into their HHA are really satisfying. It’s cool.

Ok, let’s start these off with the video I can embed. This is a special circumstance of Josuke’s Insulted Hair Mode where he doesn’t run out of his invincible rage. This is apparently a story battle against Rohan for Josuke, and this is a really good representation of what it is that happened during that fight. That combo meter just keeps on going forever. I was almost disappointed that it didn’t reach 500, but watching Josuke in his unstoppable rage is always fun.

Now to the other two. These are Nico, so through Polsy we go [Edit: Nevermind. YouTubes are go. I will leave the Polsy links for completion sake. The Josuke one even has subtitles. And now the Joseph one does too.]. This first one is the full collection of every character’s insult for Josuke’s hair. This includes Fatty, but this was apparently too soon to get Iggy and Fugo in on the fun. There’s also a demo of Insulted Hair Mode being used at the end, so check that out as well.

Second video, the whole collection of every Joseph “Your next words are” quote. There’s apparently one for everyone. Like the above, I’m not solid enough with listening to translate for you, but having Joseph call Zeppeli on “HEY, BABY,” Valentine on his “Dojyaaan,” and Abdul on his “YES, I AM,” down to imitating his voice were pretty cool. Oh, and there was that we get to hear Sugita pull a “WRRRYYY” on Dio. That was pretty fantastic. Once again, this is soon enough to contain Fatty but not Iggy or Fugo. That’s too bad in this case. Since he was able to WRY on Dio, I would have loved to hear him say, “Your next words are… Woof.” If he used actual words, that means Joseph can hear Iggy’s inner monologue, and that would mean Joseph can read the minds of dogs. Ok, that would be fine too.

There was a big post ASB Launch event back on the 1st. The event was held at Yoshimoto Mugendai Hall and was just an excuse to sit back and have some fun with the fandom. There were even stage events including a big, cosplay photo shoot. Someone was nice enough to post those images, and it’s cool to see what costumes are being pulled out. You have your normal main character costumes, but there are some costumes pulled from places I wouldn’t have guessed.

The guy dressed as Pucci? That’s his actual hair. It’s not make-up or an effect. He actually shaved his hair into that shape. The Jotaro guy is dressed up to be with the Part 3 guys, but since they had him around, they pulled him in.

Santana was not expected in that outfit. Or at all. I guess if you were expecting Santana, you’d probably have to expect him in that outfit, but the Joseph there was apparently not ready for the big diaper man and couldn’t not laugh.

This was the first one that caught me by surprise, and it’s the biggest one. The people are posing by part, so that guy in the center has to be an SBR character, but I couldn’t remember him by his outfit. That’s actually someone cosplaying Dr. Ferdinand, user of Scary Monsters. He’s the one responsible for turning Diego into everyone’s favorite Dinosaur Cowboy. Not bad.

So, how do you feel about the new live action Iggy? Boston Terriers actually do have the big ears like that, but it might have been hard and possibly dangerous to train one to eat gum, so this guy’s going the extra mile. I really like the solidarity between the guy who’s Alessi and the guy who’s Death 13? Can’t use your scythe out here? Don’t worry buddy! I’ll let you borrow my murdering axe.

There’s a lot of cool details going on in this picture. The Josuke and Okuyasu reading manga like in the commercials, the Harvest guy holding up a giant 100 yen coin, the Rohan with the Heaven’s Door puppet, the Highway Star guy even putting the checkering tape over his face. This is cool. I think that guy with the fishing pole is supposed to be Toyohiro Kanedaichi, user of Super Fly. I don’t totally recognize him, but getting a radio tower inside the hall would probably be pretty hard, so it’s cool.

Double Narancia Fury! Anyone who cosplays Diavolo gets praise just for making his weird mesh shirt thing. The guy playing one of the Pistols is also fun. I like the glasses he used to make their unique eyes.

I wonder if Josuke is so pissed because he doesn’t et to be the center stage Josuke this time. JoJolion Josuke gets to pose with the Part 4 guys because he’d be by himself otherwise.

Is anyone else uncomfortable with the axe wielding maniac being behind anyone?

(Thanks to the JoJo F2C for posting these. Original article from a Nico Blog)

Rohan Kishibe Does not Move, the 6th original story starring everyone’s favorite Morioh manga artist, has been released and also scanned and translated for your English viewing pleasure.

It starts off innocently enough with a quick trip to Tonio’s place for a good meal. Rohan has evidently started delving into culinary criticism. He and Tonio exchange a few words and are suddenly off to poach a rare form of abalone that lives in the seas near Morioh. Tonio has his reasons that he must get them. Cooking. It’s for cooking. Rohan hasn’t grown and less… well, Rohan, and goes along not because he wants to help Tonio with his “cooking,” but only because he’s personally interested. But poaching abalone was a crime punishable by death in Morioh’s past, so this won’t be an easy trip.

It’s a fun story. Another notch in the “weird shit in that town from Part 4 belt” and just another day in the lives of stand users. There’s a little action, there’s a little cameo from the old Part 4 gang, there’s the death defying usage of sea creatures to escape a watery grave. Sit down and have a read for a few minutes and enjoy it.

The only oddity is this. Apparently, this universe’s Higashikata’s own part of or possibly all of a bay, but we’re talking about the Part 4 Higashikatas, not the Part 8 ones. The translator notes that too and agrees that, for a moment, Araki might have forgotten which family he was supposed to be using. Or maybe Josuke just comes from money. He was known to wear expensive as hell shoes and socks, but he made such a big stink about losing that lottery money. Maybe his mom is just really stingy.

It’s been translated by and you can download and read it over on YouDon’tKnowThings Tumblr.

Small post about a big update. That video is a demo of the new 1.3 ASB released today, the 11th, using Josuke to show the adjustments that the game has gotten in this pretty sizable update. Combos and canceling more easily handled, but I don’t delve into fighters often enough to tell just by looking.

For those of us like that and those who want to know every in and out of the new update, there is also a full translation of the notes from the official website that detail every single change that’s been made to the game by BuddyWaters from the JoJo Forums. You can read that translation on William Zeppeli Tumblr. The same Tumblr also has a translation of the proposed changes for ASB 1.4 done by another member of the JoJo community SingerOJosuke fW. These are less a “we’re going to change this” and more a “here’s some stuff that we’re kicking around.”

Can you recognize that at a distance, even once you’ve looked at the bigger resolution? I’m sure you can tell it’s the core cast of Part 3, but do you recognize the style? With the coming of the new Part 3 anime, we’re now in a unique position of compare and contrast to how a JoJo’s anime was handled way back when. It’s been 20 years since the first OVAs came out, and 13 years since the second ones. It’s going to be a few months before we can compare them down to every detail, but the art styles are nice and available for Parts 1 all the way up to 5.

If you haven’t recognized the style yet, these were character design portraits done late last year and early this year by Junichi Hayama, the lead character designer on the 90s and 00s JoJo’s OVAs and the ill fated Phantom Blood movie. Supposedly, these were made in commemoration of the new anime, and someone on Naver collected them in further commemoration of the new Stardust Crusaders anime.

I criticized Hayama’s style when we got those scans of the PB movie character designs by saying something looked off about the faces. The only way I can describe it is that from the front, they look really wide like they’ve been slightly inflated or something. It was most noticeable on his Jotaro and Part 1 Dio, but from the sides, and with later characters, it doesn’t look quite as bad. To the contrary, he’s got a pretty nice eye for small detail. If you look at Giorno and Dio together, you can see that he took the time to make sure they have similarly shaped eyes. You can also kinda see a similar feel in appearance between Josuke and Joseph.

Most of the collected drawings focus on Part 3, but seeing Hayama’s Part 2 designs is also pretty interesting, and I wouldn’t have expected him to go for Josuke and Giorno. You can check out all the images on Naver.

Really nice coloring, isn’t it? When I saw this, my first thoughts were, “Wow. I didn’t know they were even doing a special color edition of Part 4. Must be part of Shonen Jump Remix or something.” It’s fair to think that but totally wrong. This is actually a fan work done by Vorked Tumblr, and it’s good. I mean, just look at this:

The colors seem to be using ASB designs as reference, and I like that because I’m used to it at this point. It looks excellent though. Some of the shots look like they were pulled from those Part 4 themed commercials for JoJoveller, and I love how effective the detail is on the smaller parts of color like the “BILLION” on Okuyasu’s arm.  

This color set is only done up to the first ten pages with the next ten pages on the way. You can read the rest of the pages on Vorked Tumblr, and please do support this project so it can keep going.

It’s interesting to see this of all things in color. When this is just Araki’s pen and pencil scratches, it looks so loose as though he banged it out in a few minutes with his non-dominant hand, though that’s not a bad thing. In color, it somewhat looks like that, but far more solid.

This comes from Vorked having finished off the commission for a color “Shigechi’s Harvest 1″ chapter. It’s now a full color chapter just as good as before. This time, he went a little outside the ASB colors and made Fatty’s spikes more obviously blonde. I kinda like the idea, but I don’t know if I like it better or not than him just having a spiky skull. It was the first time I ever noticed that he has a scythe design sewn into his sleeve, so it’s good either way.

You can see pages 1-10 here, pages 11-15 here, and pages 16-20 here. That last post comes with an invitation to request other coloring projects, so consider it if there’s something you’d like to see get this treatment.

Are there a lot of JoJo omake? I thought Little by Little was as close as we’d get because I’ve never seen one before, but there’s the above, so shut my mouth I guess. This was a little Josuke gag strip found by Chaos-Chaos-Chaos Tumblr and translated by mayoday Tumblr who you may remember as the one that translated all the special interactions in ASB and also my personal source for remembering how the “sickness nature” line goes.

Josuke’s bumming around Morioh being stupid made up some of my favorite parts of Part 4. If there’s any more of these out there with Okuyasu, I would love to see that.