"Welcome to the Jump World"

Jump Superstars is a game for the Nintendo DS that has been released for sometime in Japan. Due to licensing issues, the chance of this game ever coming to the US is slim to none. In Japan, the Shounen Jump comics are owned by a single party. While shows like Dragon Ball Z, and One Piece are owned by different publishers. (Dragon Ball Z is held by Atari and One Piece by Bandai respectively)

When you first pop the game into your DS, you can see that if you don't know anything of the Japanese language *such as myself* then you will need something that will translate the menus, and I am sure that you will indeed need some sort of walk-through, luckily sites such as gamefaqs.com or ign.com that offer a great walk-through. The game's presentation is that of vibrant 2D sprites, and different artwork backgrounds for each manga. The stages are somewhat lackluster, but still don't do anything to distract you from the main game play.

The main campaign is a story where you go through "The Jump World" and fight against many familiar cartoons, such as Dragon Ball Z, Naruto, One Piece, Bo-bo-bo, Yu Yu Hakusho, Death Note, as well as others. There are also a select few that haven't even been seen stateside. The main menu has 6 selections, all of which are in order : Jump World Adventure, Wireless Link Play, Exhibition Battle, Deck Formation, Card Gallery, and Options.

You will be spending most of your time playing the Jump World Adventure, as it is here where you will unlock all of your characters, or "KOMA" The Koma are a sort of a card, each Koma represents a character in the Shounen Comics, which go by the categories Battle Card, Support Card, and Helper Card. The Battle Card is what you will be able to fight with, the Support Card are characters who will do some sort of a attack, or other kind of support (i.e. health recovery, greater damage) and the Helper Card, that would usually raise attack power, recover health, or raise defenses.

There are about 800+ Koma in the whole game, and they appear as comic strips. In order to find out all of the Koma, you would need to do a sort of a "puzzle". What I mean by puzzle is that once you beat a mission, you will be given a Helper Koma automatically, but by complete certain tasks you will either get a Battle, or Support Koma. With the Helper Koma, you will need to figure out where it would fit in place with the comic strip. Such as, if there is a Koma Luffy Helper card, and you want a Luffy Battle Card, you would need to find out which Battle Card goes in place with the Helper Card. Luckily, since there are many guides out there, it will be a definite help. I could explain a little more, but I will leave it to the FAQs and guides to help you out on this one.

Although you can customize your deck, you can use the Preset decks that the game gives you, but when you do start customizing your own deck, you will want to stick with customizing. You control the game using everything on the DS. Yes everything. X,Y,B, are used to attack, while the A button is used to jump. B is your light attack, Y is your heavy attack, and pressing up, down, left, or right on the D Pad will unleash a different attack, with this, you can string combos together, and X is your special attack that you use when you have at least a 1 on your special bar, if you do not have any power in the special bar, then the button will be inactive, but don't worry, attacking, and being hit will refill your special bar.The touch screen is used to be able to switch between Battle characters, you can use more than one character at a time, and you have your support, and helper Koma as well, and this where it strategy comes to play. Such as if there are 3 characters in front of you, who are going to attack, instead of you going head to head with them, you can use a Support character to attack.

Another thing that is interesting about the combo mechanics is the use of the Dream Combos and Super Tag Attacks. To perform a Dream Combo, simply tap the card of the character you are using, automatically the character will do an attack, then quickly tap another battle card, and the character will switch as well as attacking. The Super Tag Attack is a little different. It is a super move, that two characters from entirely different manga do. An example would be Jotaro from Jo Jo's Bizarre Adventure, and Monkey D Luffy from One Piece. Their tag attack is a barrage of fists flying at opponents at an incredible speed.

To active a Super Tag Attack, you need three single cards that you unlock in the campaign, and each one has a single Japanese character on it. Their colors are Yellow, Red, and Green, and if there is a character that is able to use a tag attack with another character, you will simply connect these three cards to the two battle cards, then you simply tap one of the single color coded cards, and voila.

Sounds like a rather difficult game doesn't it? Well it reality it isn't. The game itself is really, really deep, and once you start playing the game, you will soon realize why this was one of the best selling games in Japan, as well as one of the most imported games of all time. You will catch on to the game real quick, but it is the Koma where you will have probably the most trouble. With a walk through, the learning curve would be around 30 minutes, which is good considering the fact that this game isn't in English. If you wish to import a game, don't hesitate, get this game, it may take awhile for some people to get used to the whole "Koma" thing, but once you got it down, this game is smooth as butter. I would give this game a perfect score if it wasn't for the so many Koma that was in this game, while it is the foundation of the game, it got a bit tedious when trying to find them all.

Bottom Line : 9.9

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 01/23/06