DESCRIPTION

CAST

ANIME ActionJoJo no Kimyou na Bouken: Stardust Crusaders - Egypt-hen
ANIME ActionJoJo no Kimyou na Bouken: Ougon no Kaze
MANGA ActionJoJo no Kimyou na Bouken: Diamond wa Kudakenai
OVA HorrorKishibe Rohan wa Ugokanai

REVIEWS

• 

  Fume

  92/100
  New concepts, new characters, extra bizarreness.

  Spoilers and a little swearing ahead, obviously

  Finally got here, and finally finished it, THE part of Jojo everyone talks about, but does it really live up to the hype?
  Hell yeah it fucking does! I have to say that, this is now my favorite part of Jojo yet, and Josuke is my favorite Jojo yet as well, he's absolutely gureto daze.
  Alright let's start getting into it, ok, first... the obvious artstyle switch, i like it a lot, didn't throw me off really, i liked it at first glance, but the day i started it i was sick as hell and having those crazy fever dreams so... the sky not being blue fucking destroyed me the first time, it did stop being weird afterwards ofc but damn, why though.
  Now, the cast, the IMMENSE cast of recurring characters, one of my favorite aspects if not MY favorite of this part. Having this Diamond is Unbreakable be in a single town, not traveling like a madman is a nice change, not better but different and it was awfully nice, specially having this recurring cast making Morioh feel absolutely alive, feel like an actual place, mori mori mori mori MORIOH CHO, RADIOOO! We love Morioh Cho amirite.
  And the gore and unpredictable nature of this show doesn't stop here, Part 4 definitely takes it up a notch, of course, that is seen throughout this part but you are technically greeted by it at the start of it, by having Angelo say hi to a dog in the classic Jojo way, by fucking killing it, fun.
  Now, as for the main villain, Kira Yoshikage, who shows up about half way through, not a very unpopular opinion but he really is one of the best anime villains out there, he's not evil for the sake of being evil, but neither does he have a super awesome plan and reason to take over the world, he just wants to live a peaceful life, like a plant, and well, keep up with his little hobby/fetish, which really... isn't exactly nice. And he doesn't try to act invincible in front of everyone, before being defeated, he got his ass kicked plenty of time, by many people and a cat, showing frustration and worry openly instead of trying to act tough, he feels human, and really isn't afraid of showing what he feels... actually no wait, that doesn't include the fetish!
  Now, Brosuke, he probably has the most personality out of every Jojo before him, yeah, including young Joseph, he's fun, he has his flaws which actually make him more likeable and make him feel more human, i just like everything about it, i don't think i can express it that easily, uhh, his hair is very cool.
  And last but not least, the stand, OH boy, now, these really do make the Part 3 stands look boring, because they take such great liberties with their abilities, there's simple stands like ZA HANDOOO, and then there's stands like Echoes, that can transform, and has different abilities with each form, and he can switch between them whenever... holy S-H-I-T he's cool.

  Anyway, this part has been my favorite so far, and now that i'm watching/reading Part 5 i can see just how creative they keep getting with everything, this will just keep getting better!
  Thanks for reading, and have a nice day, you crazy noisy bizarre buddy ^-^

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• 

  myvelouria

  95/100
  Guaranteed to blow your mind.

  This review is spoiler free. All gifs were made by @mob.

  

  There are few franchises that have captured my attention in the same way "Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure” has. Both as a manga and as an anime it manages to be this wholly unique experience. Through the combination of Hirohiko Araki’s never ending imagination and David Production’s efforts this has become what I consider to be one of the defining anime series of the decade. With each new installment in the franchise this feeling becomes more validated. What I want to explore in this review is the fourth part, “Diamond is Unbreakable” or DIU for short. This was a very refreshing series, especially when following something like “Stardust Crusaders”. It gave us some of the greatest characters in the franchise, some of the best arcs, it gave me my personal favorite villain in Kira Yoshikage, an amazing visual style, a wonderful soundtrack, rewatching it for the first time since it aired really gave me a new appreciation for it.

  When we first saw the key visuals for the anime I will admit I had some apprehensions. I wasn’t sure at the time if this is how I wanted to see the characters look, but as time progressed it really grew on me. The difficult thing about the aesthetics in DIU is in the manga Araki was undergoing some radical change as an artist. The earlier chapters show a significantly different style than the later ones. This is quite the situation to be in when adapting the manga. Do you try to achieve that earlier look or do you just work with what we had at the end? What fans got was this middle ground that ended up working to the anime’s benefit. This style allowed for the characters to be more expressive than they had been in previous installments. And this color palette is so unique that I really have to applaud the staff. Josuke in his royal blue gakuran against this yellow sky is so eye catching. Koichi’s silver hair is far more interesting than the blond hair many expected him to have. And I just love the shade of green they chose for Rohan’s hair. Fans over the years have brought up how there were some dips in animation quality during DIU. I can see what they mean, however the televised version still contained really strong visuals in spite of a few slips. Now something that I think needs to be brought to people’s attention is what David Pro did with it later. The bluray release of DIU was given a major facelift that looks absolutely stunning. It is just as visually impressive as “Vento Aureo”. And those infamous moments fans took note of during the broadcast were fixed. If you have a way to view this version of the anime I strongly suggest that you do.

  

  The DIU anime begins with the sounds of the Morioh Cho Radio jingle while we observe what would be revealed as a severed hand preparing breakfast. This was an anime original scene and I think the choice to open up this way was perfect. It establishes that we are going to be in what appears to be a regular suburban town, but something is lurking. We then see our previous hero Jotaro Kujo, now more mature and wise, arrive in the town of Morioh in pursuit of Josuke Higashikata, the illegitimate son of his grandfather Joseph Joestar. Jojo at its core is a generational series and one of the strengths to it is how Araki manages to build off of his previous concepts. We see a fan favorite character come back into the plot, but showing signs of progression. And it is very interesting to then see Jotaro in this mentor kind of position considering the person we saw him to be in "Stardust Crusaders". Josuke is the character Araki has said is his personal favorite and its clear why that is. He is made instantly likable and distinct from his predecessors. He doesn’t want to cause issues for Joseph’s family and we see that he’s a really good guy. That said we also get to see that he has a ferocity when pushed too far showing that he contains that same intensity we’ve grown accustomed to in this family. He also isn’t above a little bit of scheming on occasion, but it never leaves the viewer feeling against him. Josuke is still that same positive character in spite of a little sneakiness. We also meet Koichi who does not appear like he will be very important on first glance, he even says his name isn’t worth remembering. But as we follow him and Josuke we see him undergo great character development, becoming more confident and assertive without losing that humility that endeared him to viewers in the beginning. Okuyasu is the third person to round out our main trio and he is just a delight. Initially an enemy he then becomes Josuke’s best friend and a source of so much fun. I love watching Josuke, Okuyasu, and Koichi interact amongst themselves and following them through their crazy noisy bizarre town. After a series of adventures in Morioh that bring in other characters like Rohan Kishibe and even an older Joseph, we then shift gears into exploring just what the mystery is behind the hand in episode one. The anime handles the transition between these two phases in the story extremely well.

  One thing that has always made DIU feel so fresh is that it’s not a grand epic taking characters across the world, it’s a story focused within the town of Morioh. This worked because the characters Araki gave us are so engaging and the situations they end up in are so filled with creativity. Seeing Josuke navigate his daily life while dealing with enemy Stands and eventually the hunt for Kira Yoshikage helped give DIU its own distinct voice compared to previous parts. A Stand user of the week format is something we saw with “Stardust Crusaders” except here it’s intertwined with Josuke’s life in Morioh. We see the cast grow with each encounter he has and once our key players are established things feel so alive. When we see Josuke, Koichi, and Okuyasu about town it really feels like we have experienced a lot with them and that Morioh itself has taken on its own identity. The anime pulls this off with great success. They nailed the chemistry these characters share. And the seiyuu cast really brings it home. Jojo is a series that has one of my favorite casts in all of anime. We see Daisuke Ono and the late Unsho Ishizuka reprise their roles as Jotaro and Joseph. And among the new characters we have Yuuki Ono, Yuuki Kaji, Wataru Takagi, Takahiro Sakurai, Toshiyuki Morikawa, Kappei Yamaguchi, and Shigeru Chiba. The anime’s casting is just so perfect. These seiyuu just nail their roles and David Pro deserves a tremendous amount of credit for assembling such talent.

  As previously stated, DIU takes on a somewhat slice of life style. There are episodes where the characters encounter their enemy of the week and then proceed to go about their usual routines. While some episodes may not be crucial to the search for Kira, the anime doesn’t treat them like they don’t matter. We still get the same amount of excitement out of “Let’s Go Hunting”, an episode where Jotaro and Josuke hunt for a rat, that we do in something like “Sheer Heart Attack” where Jotaro and Koichi have to face off against Kira’s automatic Stand ability. Sometimes the episodes are funny and sometimes the episodes are serious, this is something Araki has always been great at balancing and David Pro has managed to strike it for themselves. There are even episodes, like “We Picked Up Something Crazy” where Josuke and Joseph find an invisible baby, which manage to serve incredible fun and then present the viewer with some strong emotions. And it all feels at home in this story. I felt the weight of the Nijimura family’s problems, I felt Hayato’s anxiety during the Bites the Dust arc, I was moved by Josuke opening himself up to Joseph. And on the other hand I always get a great laugh at Rohan being punched in the face after boasting “I’ve won” or Tonio losing his mind at Josuke because he entered his kitchen without washing his hands. None of these serious moments felt undercut by comical ones nor do the comedy scenes feel out of place in this narrative. And in the case of a character like Kira Yoshikage I always felt he walked the line between being unsettling and being darkly comical. This is what I like about him and the anime captured that amazingly. Take the scene of him licking sauce off of his “girlfriend’s” fingers after piercing the wrapping on a sandwich. Is this disturbing? Is it funny? Is it both? This is what I think Araki was trying to achieve and the anime pulled it off perfectly.

  

  The work David Pro continues to put into the Jojo anime is nothing short of spectacular. They have continuously topped themselves and showed they are willing to try different things. When DIU came out it felt so different from what we had gotten before. The tone and feeling of it felt so fresh. It managed to be everything that the manga was while also offering up exciting new things. They provided the audience with some new scenes and even linking up three different arcs into a series of episodes creating an arc all its own. Not to mention the openings which are every bit as great as fans expect even without the CGI from past series. We still talk about the Bites the Dust version of “Great Days” for a reason. We had seen a villain tamper with the opening of the show before, but never to this extent. It’s clear to me that the anime staff members are always looking to find new ways to enhance the experience. These are things that make manga fans like myself get excited for the anime. It’s not just wanting to see the story animated, but what they are going to do with it. The manga was already a masterpiece in its own right, but sometimes that’s not going to ensure a good anime. We have seen some great manga get outright terrible adaptations, but Jojo is not among them. And DIU is every bit the adaptation it needed to be. It captures the mood and spirit of the manga while also supplying audiences with striking visuals, great voice acting, excellent music, and new ways to present the story and characters they love. And I strongly recommend giving it a revisit.

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• 

  Protogeist

  80/100
  A review of the fourth season of Jojo's bizarre adventure and its use of world-building

  Spoiler Alert

  I was never that big of a fan of Made in Abyss. I found the main cast to be very uninteresting and nothing about the story struck me as anything that memorable. I feel like I could appreciate a little more when rewatching it, seeing as the themes it tackled became more clear (with Reg’s sexuality being a very interesting aspect of his character). But what I always appreciated from day one was its story. The way that you are truly placed into the world that the character inhabits is very impressive. The incredibly detailed backgrounds by Osamu Masuyama mixed with the way that the character interacted with the setting made me feel like it was a world worth exploring.
  And this is something I find few shows or movies do well. Every now and then you find a show like this that really does something with its setting, but for the most part, I find that the world I enter isn’t worth shit. And that doesn’t just mean fantasy stories, even ones that take place in the real world can’t use that as an excuse to not make the setting interesting. There’s a lot that you can do with the real world, cause it isn’t just the world. It is where you have lived ever since you were born. Your school isn’t just a school, it’s the one that you have possibly spent a lot of time in and have made relationships and memories. Your house isn’t just a house in whatever country and city you live in, it’s one where you became who you are. And I feel like many anime neglects that and just make their setting a background and not an aspect of its characters. And to my surprise, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable avoided this.

  In the fourth part of the popular Jojo series, Jotaro Kujo whom we saw defeat Dio Brando 11 years prior, meets Josuke Higashikata who is revealed to be another stand user. The two make friends along the way of hunting for the next threat in the city of Morioh.
  And this premise kind of scared me. The previous seasons of the series have almost always been about finding the antagonist and beating them. The first part of Jojo focuses on Jonathan Joestar who has to find Dio Brando and kill him, the second focuses on… was it the pillar men or was that just a side thing I don’t know, and then in the third part the focus is on Jotaro and his friends finding Dio again and killing him. But this season feels differently, however. While the focus is still on finding Kira and killing him, because of his goal of living a peaceful and normal life which I’ll get back to later, the series doesn’t leave the town of Morioh. The series has always had a lot of different settings, but few of them felt all that developed so I was scared that the town would become boring after a while. Still, there was hope. I had seen The Lighthouse a few days before which only takes place in a lighthouse, so a whole town was probably enough to make 16 hours interesting.

  In the second episode of the series, a villain by the name of Anjuro Katagiri has already started threatening Josuke and Jotaro. When the weather becomes rainy in Morioh, he uses his stand to control the water in and around his house. It becomes a tense fight scene, where the villain could come at any point from any direction. But in the end, Josuke and Jotaro find Anjuro hidden in a tree, and with Josuke’s healing ability he morphs Anjuro with a stone. And like most rocks, he stays. Anjuro, or more commonly known as “Angelo Rock”, becomes a part of the town. The rock becomes a landmark, almost a tourist attraction, where lovers meet. We continue to see Angelo rock, Josuke says hello to it which Koichi then starts to do as well. We see it become a part of the world. And this is one of the reasons why I found the world to feel so real. These landmarks are what make Morioh so special cause you can tell that people live in it. Boing-Boing Cape, a place believed to be holy for saving Yukako when she was seen “committing suicide”, Toyohiro becomes famous after being known as the man living in a tower, and Rohan Kishibe’s house whose directions aren’t noted as he’ll pretend that he isn’t at home. Irrelevant details are included to make sure that this town feels real. And I find one of these landmarks to be especially interesting, that being Reimi’s Alley. The alley where you can meet a ghost girl and can’t look back. I find this both interesting because of how reminiscent of a rumor it sounds like, but also how it is executed in the series. How important the alley becomes to telling the story.
  First Rohan gets possessed by a stand that kills its own user if it is seen, and he walks to the alley to make the stand look back and is therefore taken by the ghost-hands to the unknown. It is then later used in the end to finally kill off Kira, which puts Reimi at peace at last.
  And I find this so interesting because it tells me that both Araki and his characters know this town. Rohan knows it enough that he uses it to defeat Cheap Trick, and Araki knows it enough that he kills off the central antagonist with it. It shows that Araki wants the setting to be a part of the story and not a backdrop to it. It started to feel like a character, and I loved that.

  But like most (good) characters, it is multi-sided. And another aspect of Morioh that I feel the need to point out how the town tackles the precognition that your town is and will always be good. That what you know is good.
  Morioh resembles in many ways everyone's hometown. It’s a normal suburban neighborhood. Nothing about it sticks out, if not it’s anticlimactic existence in a Jojo season. But the structure is very reminiscent of part 3 which feels weird in a setting so calm like this one. Villains are thrown at you left and right when one leaves another appears. And you start to realize then how Morioh isn’t what you were led to believe. Morioh isn’t the image of a hometown that you have in your mind but what it actually is. Flawed and potentially dangerous. Your hometown is probably not the home of a mass murderer with a hand fetish, but it is probably closer than you think. We have been tricked by the fear of the unknown that the known isn’t to be feared. But you don’t know everything about what you think you know. And speaking of mass murders with hand fetishes, Kira Yoshikage embodies this theme.
  Kira is unlike any Jojo villain that we have seen before. Both Dio Brando and the Pillar men are clear-cut villains. Their goal is to kill the main characters, and they’ll do anything to do so. They present themself more as forces of evil rather than actual characters. But Kira presents himself differently. His goal isn’t to kill anyone, but to keep himself sane and normal. In the popular monologue about how Kira lives his life, he tells Shigechi that his life resembles our own mostly. He works for the Kame Yu department stores, he doesn’t smoke but drinks on occasions and he cares deeply about getting enough sleep. But if killing someone means that he’ll get enough sleep, then he’ll do it easily.
  And that’s how he characterizes the town. His appearance is unremarkable, his way of life isn’t abnormal or immoral really and he just wants a quiet life, not unlike what many of us. But when you look closer and see the end of the hand, you realize that something’s off. And I think I’ll always find characters like that interesting. Ones that can embody a theme or setting. That can personify what a story is about.

  At the same time, I have conflicting thoughts about this theme. While the structure helps to convey the feeling that the town isn’t what it seems, it quickly becomes very repetitive. There always seems to be another villain that can inconvenience the Jojo boys for a few episodes until they befriend him/her and they turn into a completely new person. Many of them start to feel useless in the end, like the episode where they fight a rat for 30 minutes or try to find a baby. They start to feel like fillers, even when they “develop” the characters. It turns into some pretty annoying moments where they try to make you feel emotional for a character that you’ve mostly seen as an asshole. Yukako is a good example of this, who threatens to kill Koichi in an episode but has her own arc a few episodes later where we are supposed to feel bad for her.

  In the end, I don’t think Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable is a genius masterpiece. For the most part, it is dumb fun with interesting stand powers and weird inconsistencies. It ends with the Jojo boys having fun in the town, showing all the characters we have met in all the new places we have been at, with Great Days behind it all. And doesn’t that just feel weird? We have spent all this time showing that this town isn’t what it seems, and that is neglected as Tonio makes food Okuyasu’s dad but comically only sheds his skin and maintains his weird form. Isn’t this exactly the opposite of what the story wanted to say?
  Well, I started looking at it differently. And I realized what this means, and that I lied. Kira isn’t the embodiment of the town, we only want it to. Killing Kira doesn’t change the fact that the town will still be the home of many more fucks. We only want it to. And so does Josuke. We are the Jojo boys.

  What the fuck did I just write?

  A weak 8/10

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