Jojolion’s immediate predecessor Steel Ball Run, as well as its spiritual ancestor Diamond is Unbreakable, featured some of the most creative Stand battles in the entire series. Johnny and Gyro’s race to “use up” their gifts from Sugar Mountain’s Spring, original Josuke’s high-speed chase to escape Highway Star, and the entirety of the final battle against President Valentine are all memorable because of how they use unique Stand abilities to deviate from the traditional beats of a shounen fight scene.

Part 8 takes this to an extreme, with almost every enemy Stand encounter requiring an unusual strategy to overcome. One of our favorites is Josuke and Yasuho’s fight against the Rock Human Dolomite, who uses his Stand Blue Hawaii to stalk Josuke with a contagious mind-controlling virus that uses bystanders as homing zombies (which might be an homage to the horror movie It Follows). Yasuho uses her information gathering Stand Paisley Park to pinpoint the immobile Dolomite’s location, where she threatens him with a steel pipe until he lets Josuke go. These protagonists don’t mess around for a second!

It just wouldn’t be JoJo without colorful characters who flaunt their strangeness at every opportunity, and Part 8 certainly doesn’t disappoint on that front. The Higashikata family is particularly rich in quirkiness: the patriarch Norisuke is hilariously blunt about his feelings (once telling Josuke that “your Stand is like your asshole; you don’t just go showing it off to everyone else”), the oldest son Jobin challenges Josuke to a stag beetle battle for ownership of his Lamborghini, and the middle child Joshu is such a comical scumbag that he uses his Stand to steal girls’ underwear.

However, these characters still behave like real people when they need to. Jobin may be a childish weirdo, but he cares deeply for his son and is willing to do anything to save him from the Higashikata curse. Even the ditsy oldest daughter Hato (who thwarted her family’s trip to Hawaii by forgetting that it isn’t part of Japan and thus didn’t renew her passport) gets serious when her mother Kaato comes home and threatens her younger siblings. These shifts can be a little jarring, but somehow, they work.

Once you get past the undeniable strangeness that eating a special fruit will restore one part of your body while turning another one to stone and that a newer strain of the fruit will allow you to use another person’s body as collateral instead of your own, the mystery plot of Jojolion is actually really interesting to sink your teeth into. Who are these Rock Humans, who do they work for, and what do they truly want? What happened to Holly? Why does Josuke’s body seem to be a hodgepodge of two different people?

Even now that the manga is in its endgame, the story still doesn’t have a clear main villain. Most likely, the troubles the main characters face were caused by a number of separate entities, each working for their own desires and creating temporary alliances out of convenience. This is a much more realistic explanation of a grand mystery than it just being the work of one supervillain, so it’s a refreshing change of pace from other JoJo parts.