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Jump Ultimate Stars! (Review by TCS007)
For those who read this, I thank you for this took me two whole days to review a Japan only game. I hope you enjoy the review!
So you all heard of the rumor of a smash game for the DS but it never showed itself. To be honest, there is such a thing, and the Japanese have had it for a long time. Since when? Almost since the DS came out. The first entry in the crossover series began with the NES and only 2-3 were made. It was not until the introduction of the DS that they release another crossover game again. So what is this crossover game that I’m babbling about? Heres how the game works, you imagine your favorite character from a certain series, like lets say Naruto. Ok you follow me, now take a character from another series like Bleach, and lets have them beat the living hell out of each other. That is how the game works. But in the essence of smash, you can fall and die but never knocked off into the sky and die. The basic gameplay includes two screens but you will use more of the top screen than the bottom during battle.
Basic #1: the bottom screen
During game play you will stare at the top screen a lot of times, but the bottom screen is like a deck if you will. You have 4x5 and when I first started the game, I went , “what the heck is this?”. So I did some research by going online to look up FAQs and I found one on gamefaqs by Genroh. It helped me a lot to understand the gameplay. So anyways, let me start with the bottom screen with blocks. Here is what happens, that is your deck and will be used constantly in battle. Now what the heck do you fill it with? When you first begin the game, you would go straight to the adventure mode the first time you power the game up. So the first few missions are tutorials and most people here would go what are you supposed to do? Well I’m going to tell you what to do. Each panel you get varies in size. Their size tells their functions. Their size varies from 1 block to 8 blocks and each block is called a koma. Get used to this term as you will hear it a lot.
The Komas (no not comas):
1 block is like a status helper or help koma, it has a character’s face on it and if you put it near a character koma on the edit deck screen, you will see a arrow that points in four directions, you then choose which way it should point to and it supports that character. NOTICE: It cannot point to other support or help komas, just character komas.
2-3 blocks is very different. They are assist komas if you will. To use them, you just tap on them during a game or you can just hot key them to L or R.(I will explain this later). So how do these work? Lets say you have a assist koma and you want to use it, just tap at and it will do its work. Like for example, 2 koma Goku, does a kamehameha by tapping him. Later 3komas are improved ones or just do something totally differently. They can also give you good status effects or bad ones to your opponents, while (I need to mention this), Light Yagami’s drops a ball and if it hits, the opponent will die in 10 secs.
4-8 komas, the battle komas. Now here where people want to know, this is the roster of the game. Its wise to put at least 2 battle komas in your deck. They take up a lot of room but you play as these characters. I will explain the controls a bit. The d-pad moves your character. Pressing down on the ground puts you in guard stance, all you have to do is hold down to keep guarding, but eventually it breaks because it gets weaker after each hit. Y is the quick attack and like smash bros, adding the directions change the attacks. The B button is a heavy attack and like the Y button, it adds variety. The X are special attacks and it takes up 1 sp gauge as some moves are cheap. Each battle koma has a different set of special attacks and each one has 2 different specials, you can’t use them in mid air but to use them press X or up and X. Some specials can be charged or you can tap it rapidly to get more hits. Other actions includes, down Y which takes a long time to do but when used, it can break the guard. Down B is like a feint but instead, it forces the opponent to change characters. The start pauses, but not in wireless or wifi. The select button is unique to each character and some charges the sp gauge, heals the character, or etc. Each one is unique.
Top Screen:
The upper left shows your character and his/her healthbar and sp gauge. Once your health bar drops to nothing, your character dies and appears gray on the bottom screen. If you aren’t in survival mode, then your character just can’t be used and slowly regenerates health until it is full again. Once it is full, he/she revives and you can use the character again. The sp gauge has a number next to it, that tells you how many specials you can do, all the characters in your deck share the same bar so use it wisely. The bar next to it builds up and once it is full, you get one more sp for more sp’s. You will notice that each of the characters’ status is surrounded in either of three colors; red, green, or yellow.
Red is power type, Green is knowledge type, and Yellow is laughter. Its like rock-paper-scissors. Heres how it works:
Power beats Knowledge
Knowledge beats Laughter
Laughter beats Power
Simply, if a certain type of character attacks one that is weaker, then more damage is done, if it is the other way around, the neutral amount of damage(there are set amounts of damage) is taken. If it is neither then the normal set amount is done. This applies to 2-3 koma types too.
You battle in the top screen and items are just power ups that change status or simply damages you. So its like smash, you just beat them up for points or survive the brawl. As you battle, you can change characters, by touching another battle koma on the bottom screen, to use supports just tap the 2-3 komas to activate their actions, doing this takes up one sp gauge too. 1 komas do nothing, just boost status to that certain character its pointing to or give immunity to certain effects.
Deck making:
To win in battle, you need a good battle deck. The requirements includes one help koma, one support koma, and one leader battle koma. The leader koma is required for each deck you make and plays a major role. In battles, it is the one that represents your deck. In point battles, if the leader dies, then you lose two points, if you kill someone with the leader, you get two points. If you use a 2-3 koma to kill a enemy or any other battle koma that is not the leader then you gain just one point. I will explain more on game modes later. You have a five by four screen on the bottom ( I will put pictures for easy reference), now this is where you start your deck, you just put whatever you want, but always need a one koma and a 2-3 koma type. Of course battle komas take the most room so think hard on how the set up is going to be. Once you put everything in, you can assign the deck leader and the L/R hot keys. Press L or R to assign one, you should see a white box with a orange L and a blue R (or vice-versa) and a circle that says leader. Press A on either one and you should be able to drag the symbol around. From there just press A on what you want to assign. YOU can hot key L or R on to 2-3 komas and 4-8 komas.
Other game modes:
There are three types of game modes J-star, Points, and survivor.
Points: Score the most to win!
To score, all you have to do is defeat opponents. Each one you kill nets you a point, killing with your leader nets you two points, killing with 1-2 komas gets you one points. If one of your characters dies then you lose a point, you lose two if it is your leader. If all your characters are eliminated then all your characters revive but you lose an extra 1 point.
J-Star: Get the most Stars to win!
There is one more star the actual amount of players. Getting all the stars will net you victory but if you can’t nab all of the stars then having the most stars by the end of the game will let you win. The system works like this, stars fall randomly but has a set amount and you rush to get them, once all the stars are nabbed, you begin fighting for them, lets say you have a star and you are defeated, then your star drops and people can nab it, same goes for your opponents. If all your characters are defeated then you revive and all your stars are dropped. So if you don’t have the most stars, your strategy would be aggressive while if you have the most, then its defensive/evasive.
Survivor: Stay alive to win!
This is one of the most popular modes. If a character dies in combat, they don’t revive. The biggest advantage in this mode is to have as many battle komas as possible. Last one standing wins. In case there are more than one persons remaining after a survival match, then sudden death is ensued where you all have a set amount of health that is equal and you are on a single platform. Of course the only character available is your leader. You have no sp available, so as you fight this death match, you wait to gain more sp until the bar fills so you get one sp. Of course, any specials in this fight will quickly turn the tide of a sudden death match.
Getting Komas and Misc.
To get komas you have to do the adventure mode. While it may seem tedious it is actually very fun as you get to see your variety of komas to use expanding. Each stage has around 5 missions which can range from tedious to annoying and then to confusing if you don’t have the faq to help you. After each mission, you get new 1 komas which you go like, “they’re useless man”. But no, they are the basic. There is a J-Evolution menu that takes you to a chart that lets you see all the different characters, there are branching ways that you can move to and when you get to the mysterious gray panels, you see numbers underneath and it tells you what type of gems and how much you need to get it. To get gems you beat the missions which nets you gems and komas and there you can spend it on new versions of that komas that can range from support to battle komas. Other things you can unlock from this includes, music, stages, history of the series, quizzes, and hidden worlds in the adventure mode.
Although once you beat every single mission and the hidden ones, you’ll notice that you don’t have enough gems to unlock everything, so is it possible to unlock everything? Yes.
In the main menu, there are 8 modes, but one of them leads you to a tournament mode where you go up in rankings in a tournament against computers. There are 4 tournaments, Survival, J-Star and Points tournament. Depending on how well you do in each battle, then you get points for what place you get after the battle. So the summary is, if you get the most points out of everyone by the 20th match, then you win the tournament. After beating all four tournaments, you unlock the last one which is the same rules, except it changes from J-star, Survival or points every round, forcing you to think carefully. Each time you win this 4th tournament, you get a lot of gems of each kind, allowing you to unlock the last of your things you need.
So this pretty much covers up the entire game play and basics of Jump Ultimate Stars, with the only one not covered is J galaxy mode.
For a much more in-depth overview/review check out Joshua Zimmerman’s video at:
YouTube - Jump Ultimate Stars Overview/Review
and for a much detailed faq check out Genroh’s faq at:
GameFAQs: Jump! Ultimate Stars (DS) FAQ/Walkthrough by Genroh
With this I will actually start the review. Jump Ultimate Stars is a crossover game of Shonen Jump characters, the characters can be all the way back from the 70’s or 60’s and be as modern as Naruto, One Piece, or Bleach. The battle is delicately balanced as each and every deck made has a strong chance of winning. The balance of each deck is up to you to decide as you choose whether you want more battle characters or just one strong uber character like Gear 3 Luffy, Hollow Ichigo, or 9-tailed fox Naruto. Or you can use the uber characters and rely less on your support and help and just concentrate on the fighting. Overall, the fighting is nearly perfect as some of the items can really get in the way and some of the stages’ dangers gets in the way, but the ability to turn off these items and dangers offset the flaws so on a rating of game play I would give it a 9 out of 10 because while the formula is still fun, the lack of dodging makes it inferior to Smash bros. but don’t get me wrong, the fighting is still in every way, awesome. The usage of the Shonen Jump franchise really helps this game and its adventure mode, which would be more fun if I could read Japanese. The wi-fi is actually very good as it takes around a minute or so to get your opponents and after playing them, you can actually save their deck data and doing this lets you learn more on other peoples’ strategy as there are many ways to make a deck.
If I was to just compare this to other DS games, it would be a perfect 10.
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Linear Mode
