I remember how disappointed everyone was after this game came out. Everyone was super hyped for the initial trailer and everything but the actual game sort of fell flat. I get it because the game could and should have been so much better. That said, I would still call it a great game. You get to have your favorite Jump heroes all teaming up and interacting in the story and the combat works well for the fighting aspect. Ultimately, I’m glad we got this game and I’m confident that a new one would be vastly improved since they can build off of their mistakes.

The basic story is that all of the Jump Worlds are converging with the real world. The heroes are all rather confused about what’s going on so they turn to a random organization where the head is confident that he can fix this. Goku, Naruto, and Luffy lead the 3 main teams and together they have to recruit the rest of the jump heroes and save the day. The new villains have these mysterious cubes and a dark book that allow them to make fully functional clones of all the heroes. Things are going crazy real quick so they have to be stopped.

The first thing I would note off the bat is to completely ignore the power levels here. Trust me, they make absolutely no sense here anyway. Goku, Naruto, Kenshin, etc. Everyone is portrayed to be at about the same strength and the same goes for the villains. This is all just to get all of the characters together but I do think that they should have tried a little harder to make the plot make sense. It really wouldn’t have been that hard you know? So the writing is pretty bad here but it’s still fun to see the characters around. The script makes them all sound a bit generic at times so you don’t get to see their character personalities shine through, but again it’s all just an excuse to see them running around. The story is rather weak but at least it has one. A lot of fighting games don’t even have that.

The gameplay is naturally what you are really here for and no worries, that part is really solid. It’s a 3D title like the Ultimate Ninja Storm games although it isn’t quite as polished as those since those are the golden standard across the video game industry. You use quick combos, power moves, and ultimate attacks to take down your opponents. You can freely change between characters mid combat and a big focus here is on timing. You can dodge and even counter attacks by clicking the escape button at the right time. When you do this, the enemy is always allowed to respond as well so then it becomes a back and forth game until one of you messes the timing up. This is pretty easy to do since the window you have it smaller each time. All it takes is a slight hesitation and you are out of luck.

In terms of graphics, the art style hasn’t aged all that well but the game still looks good. It was going for a hyper realistic style which as you can expect doesn’t translate very well for all of these colorful characters. It was definitely a very questionable design idea. The attacks all tend to look very flashy though although that is a double edged sword. The one weakness to the gameplay is that the cinematics all last just a smidge too long which adds up as you are playing each match. They should have cut the timing on those.

Speaking of time, get ready to see the loading screen a whole lot. I haven’t seen loading screens this long in a very long time. It’s sort of like Sonic 2006 for PS3. There are loading times after every battle and between every cutscene. For some reason the cutscenes are often broken up into multiple chunks so you will play 30 seconds, loading screen, next 30 seconds, loading screen, etc. It just keeps on happening which really keeps you busy. You want to have something on hand to multi task with during the load times.

That aside, the story is fairly lengthy though. It’ll definitely take you upwards of 15 hours to clear the campaign and aside from that there is a ton of replay value with all of the bonus missions. There are tons and tons of those to a super impressive degree. There is also a level up system so getting all of your characters to level 99 will take some time. It actually does make a difference in your stats so I recommend grinding those levels up as much as possible. Getting the Platinum trophy looks like it would be exceptionally difficult so good luck if you are aiming for that one.

Overall, Jump Force is a great game but one that is carried almost entirely by the gameplay. The modes around it can be rather lackluster and really don’t do justice to the overall premise of the game. This should have been one of those games that really wow’d you, you know? I should have still been talking about this game for years and years to come. Instead, there isn’t much reason to play it while better fighting games exist. The best you can say for it is that the game has a really fun cast of characters. That is certainly true and it will always be the main hook here but it also shows you how incredible this would have been if they had tried a little harder. So this may sound like the harshest 8 star review I’ve written but that just speaks to how much promise was here.

Overall 8/10