Jump Force Review (PC)

If you grew up in the 90s with Dragon Ball, followed by Dragon Ball Z, Naruto, One Piece and other titles from the Shueisha's Weekly Shōnen Jump anthology, then in theory, you'll love what Jump Force has to offer in terms of handling all of those IPs that molded your childhood.

Universes collide

Jump Force is a fighting game with an intense anime twist brought to it featuring characters from various manga series featured in Shueisha's Weekly Shōnen Jump anthology. If anything, this short description should be enough to make any manga fan giggle and give the title a try. If you are to play the game and finish it, you would gain access to a total of 40 playable characters from 16 series, plus the unique character that you create as your avatar in the Jump Force world. These series include classics, such as Dragon Ball, Naruto, One Piece, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, as well as newer series, such as My Hero Academia, or Boruto. I found it hilarious how everyone is breaking the fourth wall in terms of the story, as there are many occasions where they acknowledge that they are nothing but characters from manga owned by Shōnen Jump (self-bragging much?). Another feature that will make manga fans be overjoyed is how the developers tried to maintain the character's unique personalities (Goku and Luffy are hungry as always, Sasuke is the same edgy emo kid, Zoro is continuously looking to pick a fight, etc.).

+7more

How are you involved in all of this

The story starts with Goku facing Frieza, and as they fight, Frieza launches an attack that hits you. As you are close to dying, Trunks come into your rescue and resurrects you as a hero equipped with immense power.

+3more

While being resurrected, you are prompted with the character customization panel, where you can design almost every physical aspect of your character. More so, this is where you pick your avatar's combat style based on three major archetypes: that from the Dragon Ball Z universe, the One Piece universe or the Naruto universe. Once you've passed this phase of the story, everything afterward is just one big quest to unlock the rest of the characters. Besides the new characters, new abilities can be learned via combat, as the cube that was used to resurrect your stores the data of your opponent's fighting style, allowing you to use any power from any opponent you've ever faced. Some powers are also exclusively available via purchasing using the in-game currency you get when winning matches.

+2more

The graphics

The story in itself is what can be considered the inspiration of Jump Force's art style. Since the premise of the game is that one big baddy wants to merge the real world with the Jump world, the designers sought to merge the manga style with photorealistic graphics. The problem is that the execution isn't all that polished, as many of the models' animations and movements seem stiff and unresponsive, or at least that's the impression you might get during cut-scenes. However, as far as special effects go during actual combat, everything is done with flawless execution, giving an otherwise typical fighting game the over-the-top feel you see in all manga and anime works. In short, they probably created the only title in existence that looks better during actual gameplay than it does during cut-scenes or cinematics.

Messy controls if you're a PC user

Before talking about the combat, a few words must be said about the default controls you get when playing on PC. More exactly, the current state of the game makes it feel like the PC version was released as a last-minute decision, since none of the tutorials show you the keyboard controls, and instead chooses to show the controller version. More so, the default buttons are pretty oddly chosen, so to pass the Tutorial, you will have to do some random button pushing until you can fight off the opponents and proceed with the story. Only after you've reached the HQ can you change the default keys.

+2more

Beautiful combat

Regardless of whether you're playing the campaign, matches versus AI or other players, you'll be overjoyed by the sheer spectacle of what it is to fight in Jump Force. Matches are tag-team based with teams of three made up of whatever character combination you may think of. They can be swapped anytime during a match, even mid-combo, thus allowing you to chain together attacks and movements to render your opponent helpless.

All three characters from a team share the same health pool and power gauges, so you won't have to worry about having one character made unavailable because it was defeated, and matches end when one team depletes the other's health bar.  One thing you must note before all else is that Jump Force may seem like the type of game where button mashing gets you the win, but you couldn't be more wrong. Perfectly timed light attacks that break combos and moving around the environment can sometimes make for a great come-back during a seemingly lost match. I also loved the fact that they introduced destructible terrain and moves that are so powerful that they throw your opponent off the map, thus moving the fights into different areas (we've all seen scenes like these during anime, so why not?).

+5more

The HQ

While at Jump Force HQ, you can see the Leaderboards to looks for the best players out there, chat with other players avatars and more, similarly to how you'd interact in the city of an MMO. Jump Force performed flawlessly during online play, and the servers seem to handle the abundance of players very well since little to no lag was felt during online matches.

+2more

The Good

The Bad

Conclusion