JoJo, do we need to talk about its popularity? This series has spawned millions of pieces of merchandise, has had live-action movies made, several video games, and has been referenced in anime for decades. JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure is considered by most a legendary anime series and for a good reason, it is legendary! Some of the games produced for the series are equally amazing but one of the best ones is CyberConnect2’s JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle. Originally released on the PS3, this 3D fighter was pretty popular among JoJo fans and even fighting game players. That’s why with all of these remakes and remasters, we had a feeling here at Honey’s Anime that this too, would be remastered and sure enough, it has!

Titled—simply enough—JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle R has been released to the world but is this JoJo’s best battle yet or did DIO somehow sabotage this amazing fighter? Let us discover for ourselves in our review of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle R for the PS5!

As JoJo is in its 6th season—JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean—and a bit further in the manga world, there are a lot of stories here which also means there are A LOT of characters. Fighting games tend to live and die by their fighter list but don’t worry, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle R has over 50 characters plus, an original character, and plenty from the newer stories. What’s even better is many of these fighters actually play quite differently from one another when usually, fighting games with this many characters have a lot of “clone” characters. We do wish you luck trying to master just one character…

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle R is gorgeous and that isn’t surprising given the source material. Characters all look extremely detailed and are almost perfectly represented with their fancy manga/anime visuals which are very noticeable when you perform a character’s signature attack. We do think the age of this game is a bit noticeable despite the remaster work but it’s a minor issue that really only seems to be found in various arenas and some of the character models. Still, we can’t help but stare at the art of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle R and smile that CyberConnect2 really nailed what a JoJo game should look like.

Aside from the huge roster of JoJo fighters, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle R also has a ton to do. There’s a pretty lengthy story mode that goes through various stories of the series—albeit a bit loosely, an arcade mode, and several ways to battle against other real players. We think playing JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle R without knowing a good chunk of the story may lead to massive spoilers but it won’t ruin your experience either. Playing arcade mode is the safer bet if you really need to catch up with your JoJo knowledge or go online to fight other JoJo players. However, online is where JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle R really falls apart but we won’t discuss that just yet. First, we do need to talk about the most important element of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle R…the fighting gameplay.

No fighting game can survive a fan base if the gameplay is poor. JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle R luckily has a decent fighting system, though it's not perfect by any means. Battles are the traditional 2 round affair with your fighter—and an assist—duking it out on various maps from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure’s world. Arenas even have various hazards—also from the JoJo story—which can really gain a clutch victory when the odds are against you. Each character can use various specials and attacks which makes JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle R seem like it shouldn’t have any major flaws. The biggest issues we see come in two forms. One, many of the characters can range from balanced to extremely unbalanced with them being able to literally lock you down unfairly and create one-sided battles. The second issue is there are millions of combos to be found in a series akin to Tekken or DB FighterZ. JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle R is more of a fan-orientated fighter and we doubt many will see this as a great competitive fighter. Yet, the biggest issue with JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle R isn’t the simple system or the broken fighters…it’s the online mechanics.

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle R has some serious issues online and that is a surprise for a game produced by CyberConnect2. Before we hate on the online mechanics, let us applaud what JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle R tries to do by having various challenges activated per season to give players reasons to jump online and perform various feats for unlockable voice lines and poses that can be used in the customization menu. We even liked that there are multiple ways to play online with a tournament mode, player matches, and ranked. Unfortunately, these can’t help alleviate the numerous times we fought another player only to have horrible network code making some battles almost unplayable. When JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle R works, we loved testing our stand efficiency online but when it was a laggy mess…we cried as inputs would activate 3 seconds after we inputted them or found matches being interrupted by various pop ups letting us know the connection was bad. Honestly, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle R is best played offline but we do hope an eventual patch will update the network code and make us retract this statement.