Those who grew up with Anime (Japanese animation) will probably remember themselves trying to imitate a certain character from a series - maybe a superhero from say “Dragonball.” You would probably have thought to yourself once, “It would be cool if these characters could work together!” or, “I wonder who would win if…” Well, with Jump Super Stars for the DS you could do just that and have all your favourite Anime characters from the Jump Manga magazine fighting together. Now the game has evolved into the sequel “Jump Ultimate Stars” with 300 characters from 41 different titles, improvements, features and most importantly of all, Wi-Fi mode. The fictional J World is once again in danger.


J World’s been blown up and scattered across the J Galaxy.
For those of you who have never played the prequel JSS, this beat-em-up game is basically similar to Groove Adventure Rave on the GBA. Up to four characters can battle together at once in an environment full of platforms, power ups and other malicious items. The difference is before each battle, you must create your own Manga deck of “Komas” (comic panels) which allows you to switch between characters, summon support and gain stat boosts. You then go about clearing the conditions set out in each stage of the game. There are even three elements that characters can belong to, each with their own strength and weaknesses such as how “Comedy” is strong against “Strength” and “Strength” is strong against “Knowledge”.

Gameplay in this sequel pretty much remains the same as JSS but there are so many tweaks that make the overall quality much better. There appears to be a few new goals in some stages such as grabbing an item off the enemy then running away with it for 15 seconds or more. There are still stages where all you have to do is avoid being hit for so long too but this new run away objective adds more depth to the goal. Another goal I liked was trying to collect the seven Dragon Balls before any of the other familiar enemy characters got them. However at the same time, you’ll find that objectives are repeated much more often than before such as how every new planet starts off with a gain as many points as you can by knocking out your opponents.


New objectives like this, collecting the Dragon Balls are rare.
For each deck you create, you now have to set a leading character for the team. The leader gains twice as many points for knocking out other characters than other members in your team so he or she does have an advantage allowing for some greater strategy during fights. You’ll also find that you can no longer speed through the game with your best deck of Manga Komas because for every little planet you visit in the Jump Galaxy, you’ll find yourself forced to use preset decks related to a certain series.

It seems a lot of improvements have been made to the game. While in the past you had to guess who your Help Komas were supporting, this time there are arrows to help you out which is a good improvement over the prequel. Furthermore, you can now hotkey the L and R buttons to your most important Komas so that you don’t need “three hands” to play the game as much. Very handy!