Three and Out – ‘Jump Force’

Jump Force is the biggest disappointment in video games I have had the misfortune of experiencing, seeping with terrible animation work and a severe lack of understanding of fighting mechanics, causing it to be a mess to play. A vast majority of my experience playing Jump Force had the phrase, “what could have been,” running through my head at full throttle. With a game that boasts a roster of 42 characters from various popular anime series, ranging from Dragonball and One Piece to Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure and Yu Yu Hakusho, I expected high-octane battles and over-the-top super attacks. Instead, Jump Force introduces itself as a game that treats the cast as a crutch and not an advantage. Watching the cutscenes for the first time revealed to me that their focus wasn’t in animation, but in riding the coattails of the likes of Goku, Naruto, and Luffy. In motion, almost every character looks like their inflated muscles actually hinder attempts at animation, to the point where it stopped being funny and looked downright “ugly.”

Jump Force threw me into a generic headquarters that acts as the game’s hub and houses three real options for the “player”: playing online or local matches, and doing the story missions. The only differences between these options are that you have free reign in the matchmaking and that the story gives you cutscenes that damn near made my eyes bleed. The actual gameplay for Jump Force is extremely similar to the kind of combat you see in the Dragonball Xenoverse games, which has a big open area to run around in and fight your opponent (only difference being that you can’t fly), one button combos for close-quarter combat, and a set of four flashy super attacks to spend your meter on. What Jump Force suffers from the most is that the gameplay is about as brain-dead as Trunks looks in 90% of his animations. Fighting games are about player interactions and actually fighting the other player in front of you. There is almost none of that in Jump Force. The combat ultimately devolves into mashing the attack button when you have no meter and throwing out same fireballs or supers (attacks that require resources to use) that are neither cinematic nor impactful when you do have meter. The interaction consists in hoping that your opponent didn’t block and repeating the process between both players until somebody loses. I would be a lot more forgiving if they didn’t manage to take every character’s volumes of personality and run them into the ground. Jump Force has almost every big name in anime and they somehow made blasting a kamehameha with Goku feel like using fireball jutsu with Sasuke.  

Now, I wouldn’t say that Jump Force has nothing good to say about it. The campaign has a few moments where they managed to figure out that people would really like to see how this all-star cast of characters would interact with one another and execute the dialogue fairly well. One of the best cutscenes you’re treated with is a scene between Jojo’s Jotaro Kujo and Fist of the North Star’s Kenshiro staring at each other for a full minute instead of having a conversation, while Luffy watches in confusion and brushes it off as a brooding protagonist quirk. Another was watching City Hunter’s Ryo Saeba lose self-control when he first meets One Piece’s Boa Hancock because he’s a giant horn dog – and I’m a big softie for characters like that. Moments like these a breath of fresh air and managed to bring a genuine smile to my face. Still, the big problem is that these moments are few and far between in a campaign that is filled with nothing but junky gameplay.

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