Jump Ultimate Stars, quite possibly the best anime game ever made, with a whopping 300 characters from 41 different Shounen Jump franchises.

Jump Ultimate Stars is a DS 2D party fighting game along the lines of Super Smash Bros and the sequel to Jump Superstars. All of the characters were or are still having their adventures published in the Japanese manga magazine Weekly Shounen Jump. The game is developed by the Japanese developer Ganbarion, which also makes all the One Piece games.

Now, the novelty of this game is being able to play as popular Shounen Jump characters like Goku (Dragon Ball Z) or Naruto (from the series of the same name) or Ichigo (of Bleach fame) but the game also has some more obscure characters like Jotaro and Dio from Jojo`s Bizarre Adventure (a personal favorite of mine) or Kenshiro of Fist Of The North Star and some characters from series I had not heard of before such as Cobra or Jigoku Sensei Nube. Only a huge manga fan could recognize and appreciate all of the series included. The game sports a whopping 50+ playable characters, some with special forms that change their gameplay which in total gives the game around 62 playable characters.

Now, the gameplay in the game is very similar to the gameplay in Super Smash Bros. Now, in the game you have to make Koma (Japanese for ”Panel”) decks consisting of one Battle Character, one Support Character and one Help Character. Battle Characters are your playable characters and Support Characters can be called in for a support action such as an attack or status boost whereas Help Characters do not appear in battle and only provide stat boosts. You can have as many of any of these as you like, provided that you can fit these Komas in to the 5×4 Koma Grid and that the same character isn’t used more than once in the grid. There is also a Rock Paper Scissors mechanic in the game, each Battle Character comes with a certain attribute, Power, Knowledge and Laughter. Power beats Knowledge, Knowledge beats Laughter, Laughter beats Power. This system is somewhat unbalanced since most of the characters in the game are Power characters and some of the weakest are Knowledge, giving Laughter some advantage. In the game you can defeat your opponents in two ways, ether by knocking them out of the ring or depleting their health, which also turns them completely black and white.

The mission mode of the game needs some very basic knowledge of Japanese to understand the various mission objectives, or you can use some of the very useful guides found on the internet. The game`s learning curve is around 30 minutes until you can freely navigate around the menus without problem. The mission mode is fun at first, but then in the end it starts to be boring and the only reason why you play it is to get all komas and to get gems to upgrade komas in to stronger versions.

Now, just like in Smash Bros., the real reason why to get this the multiplayer, which can be played online thanks to the DS`s Wifi function. The only problem the multiplayer has, again, just like with Smash Bros., is that the community for this game is dumb and elitaristic.

Sadly, this game will never be released outside of Japan due to different publishers owning the licenses to the different series in the United States, and some franchises being unlicensed in America. The only way of getting this game in America or Europe is by buying it from import sites like http://www.play-asia.com

Also some anime fans might not like it that some characters from more recent series aren’t in their current powerlevel, not being included or not having a playable character such as in the case of Death Note.

8/10

This game is most certainly worth importing.