JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle R

My first few hours with All-Star Battle R felt less like booting up a fighting game and more like watching someone flip through a lovingly curated JoJo scrapbook at high speed. Every menu is plastered with halftone manga art, every pre-fight cutscene fires off a character quote, and the taunt mechanic freezes the camera for a full cinematic close-up. CyberConnect2 clearly understands the assignment: this is a celebration first, a competitive fighter second. The fighting system itself is built around a three-button light-medium-heavy setup plus a dodge-slash-sidestep button that lets you shift the lateral plane of combat, giving it a texture somewhere between classic 2D fighters and something like Tekken. Quarter-circle inputs handle special moves, and two tiers of super attacks - the Heart Heat Attack costing one meter bar and the Great Heat Attack burning two or three - give every character a reliable flashy finishing option. An Easy Beat auto-combo mode means newcomers can mash light attacks into something that at least looks impressive. The roster spans all eight parts of the franchise plus a bonus character from Hirohiko Araki's older work, and all 50-plus fighters are unlocked from the start. Each character family has a distinct fighting style: Hamon users from the early arcs play very differently from Stand users, Mounted fighters add a horseback dimension, and the Mode stance characters shift their moveset mid-fight. That variety is what keeps match-up exploration genuinely interesting. The main single-player draw is All-Star Battle Mode, a restructured version of the original game's campaign that strings together over 100 fights across all the story arcs, mixing canon clashes with what-if matchups and sprinkling in per-battle modifiers - things like self-refilling health bars to simulate the power gap between early-arc and late-arc characters. Stages also carry environmental hazards tied to caution markers on the ground: stumble into a marked zone and you may eat a galloping horse or a falling chandelier. It is arcade-mode energy with a light rewards loop attached, unlocking costumes, alternate colors, and gallery content as you go. For offline players, this mode alone delivers solid value. There are real criticisms that deserve airtime, though. The netcode lacks rollback, and fighting game communities have grown to expect it as a baseline. Online play can be inconsistent as a result, and the ranked pool thins out for players climbing the ladder. The practice mode is functional but thin on tools - no transparent frame data, limited tutorial depth for advanced techniques - which will frustrate players who want to grind seriously. Some of the re-recorded voice work is noticeably uneven in energy compared to the anime, and audio mixing buries character lines under music and SFX at default settings. None of this breaks the experience, but it does cap the ceiling for anyone hoping this is their next long-term competitive game. The honest pitch is this: if you know who Dio Brando is and why Jonathan Joestar matters, All-Star Battle R is an extremely satisfying way to spend time with the franchise on PC. The style commitment is total, the roster is generous, and the offline content is more than most anime fighters bother to include. If you are coming in cold with no JoJo context, the game will not explain itself to you, and without that fan-service glue holding things together, what remains is a serviceable but not exceptional fighter that sits comfortably below the Guilty Gear Strives and Tekken 8s of its era.

Alex · Scout Team

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