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This post is by guest writer Liam O’Loghlen.
CRUSADERS!!
Hirohiko Araki’s JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure is an enigmatic cult hit of 80’s shounen manga. What began as some sort of flamboyant amalgamation that can only be described as Fist of the North Star meets Victorian Horror meets The Room has evolved into an icon of sorts in Japanese popular culture. Nearing 30 years it continues to thrill audiences with its pulp wackiness, and just might continue a lot longer given Araki’s tendency to not physically age at all.
Unfortunately, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure lacked a consistent adaptation for many years, and thus never quite took off with western audiences beyond a certain niche status. That changed with the highly acclaimed 2012 anime, which saw the first full-length adaptation of the series starting from the beginning. Since then the series has experienced a renaissance of sorts that’s seen a much larger western fan base than the franchise has ever seen — not to mention countless references in basically every second or third anime since — so a follow-up adaptation seemed only inevitable.
JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders sees the continuation of the 2012 anime into perhaps the most iconic part of the entire series, following the shenanigans of a gang of five flamboyant muscle-bound goofballs on their long journey to Egypt. It’s much longer than its predecessors, being split into two 24 episode series in adaptation. The first half of Stardust Crusaders sees much of the resulting experimentation with this, giving us some strong ideas but also dragging its feet when ideas don’t work out. It’s a bumpy ride, but it sure is still JoJo.
Episodes 1-3 Review
These first three episodes tell us everything we need to know: our main character is Jotaro Kujo, grandson of Joseph Joestar, and he’s developed a mysterious power known as a Stand, a manifestation of one’s fighting spirit. In order to save his mother, he has to find and vanquish the revived Dio. JoJo delivers this exposition with the sole intent of rousing immediate excitement, and it manages to do just that. When Joseph shouts with extreme intensity that Dio has the charisma “that makes soldiers want to obey dictators”, we certainly don’t come to any sort of understanding about Dio as a character. What we get is a re-iteration that Dio is most definitely very evil, and that his evilness needs to be stopped. Such an outlandish series needs these kinds of villains who are so unforgivably cartoonishly vile that we can’t help but want to see them vanquished.
Even as the third part in a long-running series, Stardust Crusaders is simple enough and delivered with enough clean-cut coherency that many will have no trouble beginning the series right here. It’s also a watershed moment for the series. The backbone of this is the concept of Stands, which still remain present in the series to this day. Many of these early Stands are so straightforward they’re essentially prototypes, and it’s a concept that definitely requires some getting used to if you watched or read the first two parts and became familiar with Hamon.
Stands are able to facilitate Araki’s rapid-fire ideas more fully.
The benefit of this in the long run, and the reason why Stands are still an integral part of the series to this day, is the ease of adaptability. Hamon presented itself as a nondescript spiritual energy, and JoJo was inventing ridiculous new ways to use it at such a rapid pace that it risked a loss of engagement. Stands are able to facilitate Araki’s rapid-fire ideas more fully, not only because they’re distinct from anything that’s been seen in the genre, but because the basis of one being a physical manifestation of fighting spirit allows it to be adapted in an almost infinite number of tangible ways.
On that note, it should be said that JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure is not a traditionally “good” action series. It doesn’t ground itself in smart choreography or well-defined rules, but as far as writing action as a pure spectacle goes, one need not look further. JoJo relishes in absolute style over substance, cranking floaty action scenes up to 11 with any number of absurd variables. When Jotaro battles Kakyoin there are no clever strategies involved. The momentum shifts are dictated wholly by the personal whims of Hirohiko Araki, and we follow along with very little other reason than because we’re invested in the atmosphere. This atmosphere is dictated by absurd sequences of events, such as Jotaro having to lock lips with the possessed school nurse to rip Kakyoin’s Stand out of her. In true JoJo fashion, the elaborately ridiculous moment is given its own completely self-serious dramatic still frame. A series with half the enthusiasm and energy doing what JoJo does would fall totally flat.
Lovingly adapted once again by David Production, Stardust Crusaders still manages to capture all the energy and all the endearing elements that make the source material a much loved part of the JoJo franchise. It takes care to retain the most stunning individual frames that give the manga its bite, and it makes the series its own with the ridiculously macho vocal performances by the cast, the raw crunching sound effects, the intensely upbeat score and, perhaps most of all, with the schizophrenic color palette that changes at the drop of a hat when things get heavy in the heat of action. It’s a kind of distinct visceral tone that you don’t come by very often.
It shouldn’t be denied that JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders is, like its predecessors, a firmly lowbrow series. If one doesn’t get squeamish at the gruesome violence one might be repulsed by schlocky lines such as “This isn’t a woman’s strength”. With that said, I’ve still seen very few who can resist the temptation of indulging in this strange and wonderful franchise, and Stardust Crusaders is far from an exception in the establishing episodes. Stardust Crusaders bursts out of the gate with the same lovable camp and effervescence as its predecessors, ready to take us to wild new places.
Episodes 4-7 Review
From here we journey on to Egypt, with our crusaders on the next flight there. This is where we start to see the series settle into the episodic groove of Stardust Crusaders. As one might expect, they don’t have such an easy time getting to their destination, as they find their plane attacked by an enemy Stand called Tower of Gray. The Stand user shows his flamboyance in the usual JoJo villain fashion, demonstrating that his quirk is ripping people’s tongues out. Kakyoin defeats him by sneaking Hierophant Green’s appendages under the seats to launch a surprise attack at the last moment, which he explains in the obligatory dramatic speech after Tower of Gray lies defeated. It demonstrates the basic JoJo formula of the protagonist’s last moment comeback with the convoluted secret strategy, while also demonstrating how Stands can be built around all sorts of wacky scenarios to deliver fun results.
But defeating Tower of Gray is to no avail, as they find the pilots have already been killed and the plane is ready to crash, leading to the great punch line that this is the third time we’ve seen Joseph on a crashing plane in the series. They manage to safely land in the waters near Hong Kong where they plan a new route to Egypt, but not before they find themselves met with Jean Pierre Polnareff and his Stand, Silver Chariot.
Silver Chariot, described by Polnareff in the charismatic JoJo way as having the swordsmanship to “make gaps between nothingness and nothingness”, goes up against Avdol’s Magician’s Red in a very classically JoJo showdown. Avdol appears to be on the verge of defeat only to reveal his ridiculous secret strategy. Polnareff appears to be on the verge of defeat only to reveal his own ridiculous secret strategy that makes him even stronger than ever. Avdol appears to be on the verge of defeat once more only to have one more secret strategy that defeats Polnareff. It’s straight suspense-driven action bouncing between extremes, boosted by the startled narration by Joseph following each twist. Polnareff shows chivalry in defeat, and they decide to let him tag along once they hear his motive to avenge his sister’s death at the hands of a man with two right hands, and so the crusaders come together in their complete form.
With the crusaders together we get to the one element that I believe Stardust Crusaders definitively has over the other parts of the series: character dynamic. The “bromance”, so to speak, of the five main cast members is an iconic symbol of the franchise, and it’s not hard to see why we all love them so much when they go back and forth in ridiculous banter about school uniforms and cigarettes and all sorts of other silly things. It’s almost a shame that they have the perilous journey looming over them the whole time, and boy does it get more and more perilous.
JoJo is willing to abandon common sense for a fun time.
The crusaders’ boat route is halted by a Stand user who sneaks on board, and then halted again when they find themselves on another boat that happens to be a Stand in itself controlled by a gorilla. It might just be their own lack of attention to detail that’s to blame for finding themselves in these messes, but if they planned ahead more carefully instead of bantering there wouldn’t be anything worth watching here. We certainly wouldn’t get to see surreally amazing moments like Jotaro making a sleazy chain-smoking ape cry blood. The importance of structuring spectacle vastly outweighs the importance of structuring logical scenarios in entertainment-driven narrative, and JoJo is such a triumph of entertainment at its best because it’s always been well aware of that, and more than willing to abandon common sense when it gets in the way of a fun time.
There are, unfortunately, some moments here where JoJo isn’t at its best. The battle between Jotaro and Dark Blue Moon in particular lags a bit. It’s a fairly so-so spectacle given a fairly so-so adaptation, with a lot of very ordinary animation cuts in the major moments of the battle breaking the immersion slightly. Because of this episodic “Bad Guy of The Week” structure the strength of the series going forward is largely dependent on the strength of each individual episode’s big battle. Luckily, with the exception of the aforementioned battle, Stardust Crusaders is still able to confidently deliver thus far.
Episodes 8-11 Review
As we reach towards the halfway point, Stardust Crusaders begins to feel a little bit tired. It’s not without its JoJo charm though, starting strong with a particularly unusual Stand battle between Polnareff and Soul Sacrifice wherein Polnareff finds his body tied up and trapped under the weight of a king-sized bed, having to blindly send his Stand into battle with the doll who perpetrated it. There’s a very odd suspension of disbelief that comes from a character being caught in such a peculiar pickle, one that makes you question why you were even invested in the danger of the scenario when you can barely make sense of it, when you know full well Polnareff is just going to burst out with a crazy strategy as soon as things seem hopeless. That’s yet another beauty that arises from JoJo’s distinct approach to action setpieces.
Another one of the fun elements of Stardust Crusaders that you start to get a feel of at this point is the sense of a journey. Seeing these endearing characters go from place to place and interact with different cultures makes being along with them for the ride a real treat. Polnareff tends to be the butt of the joke in most of these situations. In Singapore he finds himself being told off by an officer who mistakes his bag for garbage and tries to fine him for littering, and then in India he gets scared away from a public bathroom by a pig sticking its head through the toilet bowl. Of all the goofy lead characters Polnareff is quite arguably the silliest, and the way he interacts with these situations and cultures is always a riot.
Polnareff still gets time to be taken seriously, though. He finds out that his sister’s killer, J. Geil, is in India, and rushes out on his own without a second thought to get his revenge, brashly defying Avdol in the process. This leads to an ambush by J. Geil and another Stand user, Hol Horse. Avdol is able to save Polnareff, but he pays with his life in the process. The moment when Polnareff tries to be tough in front of Kakyoin about it only to turn around with his eyes overflowing with tears and an insincere thumbs-up is one of the dramatic “manly tears” moments that JoJo thrives off of in its big macho melancholy scenes. It’s not as impactful as other scenes like this in previous parts, but it’s satisfying nonetheless.
Sadly, the battle between Polnareff and Kakyoin against J. Geil that tops this off is fairly underwhelming. It lacks the exciting execution and the feeling of high stakes that peak JoJo does so well, and given this was a battle that’s been built up to for a few episodes as Polnareff’s motive for coming along for the ride, it’s doubly disappointing. The earlier battle between Jotaro and Yellow Temperance also doesn’t live up to expectations. As I said earlier, Stardust Crusaders depends a lot on its mostly episodic battles in the long run, but the momentum that keeps those together starts to decline. At the very least, Stardust Crusaders doesn’t fall apart, and the continually weird and exciting “JoJo-ness” and the satisfaction of just being along for the ride keeps the ball rolling.
Episodes 12-17 Review
We continue Stardust Crusaders with a very mixed collection of episodes that begin to veer towards disappointment. Our first Stand battle has Joseph against a giant sentient tumor named Empress. It’s a more comedy-oriented battle than the last few because of Joseph’s relative lack of physical strength at his age, but it turns out to be a bit of a miss in both its action and its comedy. It has a few somewhat fun moments and a couple of chuckle-worthy gags, but it doesn’t deliver the thrills or the laugh-out-loud comedic moments I’m used to from the series. It does, however, score some points with its brief callbacks to the previous JoJo series, with Joseph’s attempt to use Hamon and of course his catchphrase: “Your next line is going to be…”.
The anime comes back from that with a big hit of a Stand battle, between the four remaining crusaders and Wheel of Fortune, a superpowered car (yes, a *superpowered car*). This is a battle that manages to really deliver all the thrills and laughs that it goes for with full confidence: Wheel of Fortune’s utterly banal strategy of reversing the sign pointing to Pakistan so they go in the opposite direction; Joseph and Jotaro’s complete failure of a strategy to beat up random people at a bar hoping one of them is the Stand user; Polnareff accidentally taking his foot off the brakes when their car is being pushed off the edge of a cliff; Wheel of Fortune’s ridiculous ability to fire gasoline bullets; Wheel of Fortune’s user bombastically proclaiming that “Part Three is over!” when he appears to have burned Jotaro alive; Jotaro’s corny “Then who’s going to replace me, Jotaro Kujo?” retort when he reveals it was only his jacket that got burned; and the crusaders having an absolute blast sadistically heckling their defeated foe. These are the kinds of moments that I’m here for. This is topped off by David Production putting their all into adapting the visual energy that gives the big moments of this battle the self-serious intensity to fully engage despite how silly everything is. It’s a great JoJo action setpiece through and through.
Unfortunately, the next Stand battle has an episode long prelude with little more than light narrative progress, which is essentially the last place JoJo wants to be. It completely halts the series’ momentum, coming as an incredible disappointment. The following episode somewhat makes up for it with the battle itself, a satisfyingly intense showdown with a climax so gloriously senseless I won’t even begin to explain it.
Stardust Crusaders looks to be going for another hit with the following battle against Steely Dan (given the laughable official name of “Dan of Steel”), who burrows his Stand, The Lovers, into Joseph’s brain and inflicts any damage done to him tenfold on Joseph. He uses this to make Jotaro his slave while the others figure out a way to defeat him, leading to some humorous hijinks. It also leads Polnareff and Kakyoin to the strategy of shrinking their Stands down to enter Joseph’s brain, an interesting ability made possible by the slight vagueness of Stands in general, but unfortunately their actual strategy to beat The Lovers is an underwhelming one. Instead of inventing a new way to defeat Steely Dan, the crusaders just rely on him having no clue about their actual abilities and reusing old tricks. It takes away one of the greatest joys of JoJo in seeing them overcome insurmountable odds with such a basic strategy, which makes for a bit of a deflating moment.
The third quarter has some moments that are plain running on fumes.
Stardust Crusaders continues to deliver plenty of classic JoJo moments, but the third quarter sees them slightly outweighed by the moments that are plain running on fumes. It’s a bit of a sad place to be with JoJo, but far from a tragic place. There’s plenty of room for a full recovery, and plenty of good reasons to hope for one.
Episodes 18-24 Review
The final stretch does indeed begin to make a solid recovery, putting the stakes high with a literal Sun Stand. It raises the tension to its peaks, giving a vivid visual depiction of the crusaders very nearly succumbing to heat stroke, before everyone but Joseph breaks out into maniacal laughter once they realize the Stand user was using a cheap mirror trick to fool them. It wasn’t an exciting climax, but it sure was a laugh out loud moment.
The next battle is with a baby whose Stand, Death 13, is haunting their nightmares, and Kakyoin is given the absurdly difficult task of convincing them of it. He makes up for the brief moment his friends were convinced he was crazy by getting the baby to literally eat its own *ahem* excrement, as a true hero does to their defeated enemies…or at least that’s what they do in JoJo. Aside from that, the dream sequences themselves have a gorgeous surreal aesthetic, giving the whole battle a real sense of terror.
Then we get something a little more reflective than the usual JoJo, with Polnareff meeting what appears to be Avdol’s emotionally damaged father and having to come to once again face his demons. Obviously JoJo doesn’t have the nuance to carry a pure emotional arc, and quite frankly I don’t think Araki has any interest in ever doing one, so we get this story interspersed with a solid monkey’s paw thriller where Polnareff goes up against a Stand named Judgment capable of granting wishes. If there’s one thing to be admired about JoJo, even at its weakest it’s that it’s a popcorn series that knows its limits as a serious narrative, something that looks to be bordering on endangerment in modern day popcorn anime.
It’s easy to forgive JoJo for being written by the seat of its pants.
In fact, so aware of its limits is JoJo that the whole reason they were on the island was to meet up with Avdol, who everyone but Polnareff knew was alive basically the whole time. Well, that’s the JoJo explanation, but the real story behind it is that Avdol really did die in the original manga and was brought back purely because of popular demand. It’s easy to forgive JoJo for being written by the seat of its pants to such an extent because it’s so good at it, making the whole situation an excuse for the rest of the crusaders to pull a mean-spirited rib on Polnareff.
And mean-spirited is exactly what these goofs are. Polnareff and Avdol find Judgement’s Stand user is hiding underground and decide to answer nature’s call in his air supply. Need I say more? Granted, the Stand battle itself has an uneventful climax with Avdol straight up overpowering Judgement, but at least there was a good laugh to be had. Plus, Polnareff’s big character moment wasn’t all for nothing, given he finally properly comes to terms with both the death of sister and what he thought was the death of Avdol.
The final battle of Stardust Crusaders‘ first half is against Priestess, and it’s a bit of a ho-hum one. It carries some decent tension but ultimately ends in “Jotaro punches everything really hard”. It still manages to make for a respectable finish for the first half of this adventure though, leaving the series at an appropriate and comfortable stopgap with no nagging minor threads right at the beginning of their journey into Egypt.
JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders is one of the more inconsistent entries into the franchise, seeming to bounce between explosive highs and slightly murmuring lows from episode to episode, but truth be told JoJo wouldn’t do without it. It’s a bustling adventure filled with ridiculous characters and plenty of thrills and lots of laughs. If you want JoJo, you’ve got it right here. If you want more JoJo then come along for the rest of the ride.
Continue to Stardust Crusaders: Battle in Egypt >
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