Even accessing upgrade menus or stores requires a load. The loading also makes the already-obnoxious elements that much worse. The load times leading into a cutscene or fight can take 30-45 seconds – sometimes longer than the thing you’re waiting to see. To make all of it worse, the loading is insufferable. It makes it feel like you’re trying to order a drink at a busy bar instead of rushing to save the world from devastation. The hub area is boring, and if you’re playing online, it is overloaded with online players crowding the mission areas and clipping through one another, sometimes even making it difficult to talk to the NPC to accept a mission. When there aren’t story missions available at the mission counter, I just had to walk around the large hub area until I found the next character who had an exclamation point over their head. Getting to those story moments is also needlessly obtuse. These low standards for presentation make every potentially interesting moment feel cheap and boring. At one point, when a character was meant to leave the frame, they just slid out of view without taking an actual step. On the rare occasion that a cutscene has movement, it is the least amount of movement possible. Nearly every cutscene amounts to an assortment of characters standing still and, at most, turning their heads towards one another to speak. But those character moments have no emotion to them. It’s an excuse to get characters like Goku and Luffy in a room together to talk about how hungry they are, or to see Trunks and Kenshiro connecting because they are both from apocalyptic settings. The story conceit for why everyone gets together is silly – maybe even dumb – but that’s fine. Then I do mine, and you do yours again until someone’s health reaches zero.” Even with the myriad special attacks you can see by choosing different characters, it all becomes repetitive. It boils down to: “You do your big attack, and I will wait until the animation completes. The big, flashy combat animations are impressive, but they are also time-consuming and emphasize the back-and-forth nature of each fight in a bland way. When you find the rhythm of combat, the experience becomes a spectator sport, for better or worse. Playing as Midoriya from My Hero Academia and hitting Goku from Dragon Ball as he charges up a Kamehameha with a Detroit Smash is an exciting thing – which is admittedly difficult to explain to non-fans. ![]() I like how combat is more about finding the best windows to execute your big attacks, and I enjoyed experimenting with finding the best three-character combos to take into the fray, which highlights the fun mashup nature of the game. You don’t need to learn every fighter’s best combos and counters every character plays similarly, and pulling off their big special attacks is more about keeping an eye on the meters that build up as you take and receive damage. ![]() It is a fighting game, but not in the traditional sense. ![]() The combat is Jump Force’s strongest element. Unfortunately, the combat never becomes totally engaging, and the sloppy presentation drags down the other elements that had potential. The 40 characters have multiple bombastic animations for their noteworthy attacks, and it’s all wrapped up in a goofy story where universes collide. Jump Force is not the first time characters from disparate Shonen Jump manga and anime franchises have faced off against one another in a fighting game, but this release represents the biggest and flashiest mashup brawl they have ever engaged in.
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