Jump Force (Deluxe Edition)

Jump Force is a 3D arena tag-team fighter built as a crossover celebration of Weekly Shonen Jump's 50th anniversary. You pick a squad of three from a roster that spans Dragon Ball, One Piece, Naruto, Bleach, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Hunter x Hunter, My Hero Academia, Fist of the North Star, Yu-Gi-Oh, and more. The Deluxe Edition bundles in the Character Pass, pushing the total roster toward 57 fighters when you count DLC additions. Fights are 1v1 on paper but you're really managing a team of three, swapping characters mid-combo while your bench acts as support. Each fighter carries four signature special moves sorted into seven types (short-range, dashing, counter, area-of-effect, long-range, shield, and buff), and the shared health bar across your trio keeps matches tense even when one character is clearly outclassed. For a couch session with anime fans, this thing genuinely delivers. The spectacle during actual fights is hard to deny. Fireballs from Goku trade with Naruto's Rasengan, Sasuke throws his Rinnegan around, Kenshiro makes people explode, and the whole screen erupts in the kind of over-the-top special effects you expect from the source material. If you have three friends who grew up watching these shows, the arguments alone about team composition are worth the price of entry. The game does support split-screen local multiplayer, which is the main reason to care about it as a group activity in 2025. Pick your team, argue about who gets Goku, someone picks Yugi just to be annoying, good times. That said, you should know what you are getting into. The story mode is widely agreed to be a low point. The premise (manga worlds collide with the real world, a faction called the Venoms led by Kane and Galena tries to take over, you build your own custom avatar and join one of three squads: Alpha under Goku, Beta under Luffy, or Gamma under Naruto) sounds fun on paper but collapses under repetitive missions and stiff cutscene animation. The decision to render iconic anime characters in a semi-realistic art style rather than leaning into their original visuals is divisive, and most critics landed on the wrong side of that divide. The combat itself is accessible enough for button-mashers but lacks the depth to hold serious fighting game fans for long sessions. Online ranked play and the lobby system have both been shut down since 2022, meaning this is now purely a local and offline experience on PC. Hardware note for PC players: this is a controller game. A standard gamepad covers everything well. There are no wheel or HOTAS considerations here, obviously, but the face-button and trigger layout for attacks, assists, supers, and blocks is straightforward once you get through the tutorial. It launched with non-remappable controls on some versions, so check current PC control options before diving in. Bottom line: Jump Force works best as a party game for anime fans. The roster is genuinely exciting, the fights are loud and flashy, and local split-screen keeps it relevant as a couch multiplayer option. Solo players chasing a deep fighting game should look elsewhere. With online services dead and the game delisted from digital storefronts, the Deluxe Edition key market is the only way in. If your friend group has at least two people who can name more than five Shonen Jump series without Googling, this is a decent time. Everyone else will bounce off it after an hour.

Riley · Scout Team

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