Impressions | JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Eyes of Heaven (demo)

Today I want to bring you some really quick impressions on a demo of a game I've been wanting to play for a while JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Eyes of Heaven. I've been so obsessed that I checked other countries' PlayStation store to see if they still had the demo available (the Portuguese/European store doesn't have it anymore, only the full game). Thankfully, the US store still had it and so I played an hour or so of free battle and the first chapter of the story mode, aka the JoJo part 3 (“Stardust Crusaders”) chapter.

The first and foremost thing to attract me is obviously the abundance of JoJo content in this game: a roster of playable characters that covers all eight manga parts, including the ongoing Jojolion. From the JoJos of each part and their group to the respective antagonists and even a healthy dose of side-characters, from what I’ve seen this game has a lot to offer. Unfortunately, that’s out of this article’s scope, as the only playable characters available in the demo are Jotaro Kujo and Noriyaki Kakiyon from Part 3 (“Stardust Crusaders”) and Higashikata Josuke and Nijimura Okuyasu from Part 4 (“Diamond is Unbreakable”).

However, even in the demo the attention to detail in references to the manga and/or anime are frequent. The designs of each menu call back to moments and places of the stories and simple things like showing “Finished loading, baby” at the end of a loading screen make it seem like the developers were actually familiar with the source material. Even the fighting stages (from which there are only two available) are filled with callbacks to specific scenes or even stage interactions like resting at a café in the Morioh stage or fighting in Cairo’s rooftops.

But, even if all this Jojo content is great, I wouldn’t be positive about the demo if the actual combat wasn’t good enough. Here, players are put in 2v2 arcade-y fights. To be honest, I mostly spammed quick attacks and Ora Ora Oras (yes I played mostly with Jotaro), but it had the satisfying feeling of landing an attack that I was expecting of a Jojo game. Besides the basic quick and heavy attacks, you can also perform six special attacks and a final “unique” attack. For example, Jotaro’s attacks included his iconic Ora Ora Ora, but also Star Finger and a couple others. To get a sense of what is the “unique” attack I mentioned, in Jotaro’s case it was his time stop, in which you can literally pick opponents and throw them off-stage. Plus, because characters fight in teams of two, special teams like Jotaro and Polnareff have a unique combination attack which can be used late in the fight. On the other hand, odd team-ups like Part 3 Jotaro and Okuyasu have a normal double attack.

While somewhat simple, I found combat to be fun and after trying the four playable characters available in the demo, I can say, at the risk of being wrong, that CyberConnect2 did a good job of recreating each individual character in the game, and not just the same character with the same five or six attacks spread over dozens of skins.

One big thing that I need to bring up about this game is that the voice actors for the characters from Part 4 forward won’t be the ones you are expecting if you have watched the anime for that part and the following (Part 5, “Vento Aureo”). At the time the game released, the anime adaptation of “Diamond is Unbreakable” was still a ways off, so both voice actors and even color schemes will be different from those of the anime adaptations.

I can’t really speak much more since the demo itself didn’t have that much content, but from what I’ve played and from what I’ve seen online I can’t wait to find this game on sale in the PlayStation store. I’ve been wanting to play a JoJo game for a while and this seems like a very competent attempt at bringing the over the top action to our PS4 controllers.

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