First off, I’m a little worried about the pacing of this arc. We’ve got 16(?) volumes of manga to adapt here in Stardust Crusaders, but only 24 episodes, and the pace has been pretty slow. I hear this arc has quite some stuff that the anime’ll probably skip, but I can’t help but be a little nervous. It’s not easy to recreate the genius that is Part 2: Battle Tendency, and I get the feeling that if they don’t pick up the pace soon things’ll feel very rushed and choppy nearing the end. Not good.
Anyways, this was a pretty normal episode for Jojo. Not much to talk about when Jojo basically boils down to being a very stylish (and of course effective) way of presenting extremely muscular men fighting zombies and vampires. This week was the 4’s attempt to fly over to Cairo by airplane, which ended up getting hijacked by the stand user with the Tower of Gray stand – a bug-like stand with incredibly speed and kills by ripping out the tongues of its victims. I’m going to complain a bit here – normally I get squeamish when I’ve to deal with violence in my anime, but damn are those black censor bars annoying as heck. They kind of leave nothing to the imagination, yet also make shots look a lot less impactful, which really ruins the fun of Jojo when I’m watching this for the spectacle. There NEEDS to be blood. I need to be able to see it – it does have an impact on my enjoyment.
This stand user was pretty lame though, but he’s a minor character in the arc I’m sure, so I’m glad his fight was over and done with quick. We did get to see some glorious Noriaki/Hierophant Green action though. Boy was that a nice fight. There’s no other anime that can make a fight like this look as cool as Jojo – it basically boils down to a guy shooting a small, fast-moving target but with crystals instead of bullets, before trapping the target and ripping him into pieces. If it didn’t have Jojo’s signature kickass visual style and sound direction I would’ve fallen asleep.
The main 4 make an emergency landing after defeating Tower of Gray, landing in Hong Kong. The few moments of seeing these 4 ridiculously huge burly men try to blend in and act like a bunch of casual tourists was pretty funny. As is Kakyoin continuously trying to impress Jojo with his knowledge of Hong Kong and catch his attention after Jojo saved him and made his heart go doki do/gets shot
Seriously though, that was amusing as heck. Only thing that wasn’t so amusing was Avdol. He’s still really boring. We don’t need a walking narrator if his name isn’t Speedwagon and if he doesn’t have a nice hat, though I do appreciate the effort. Which is why I’m really excited to see a new character on board today! He pretends to be a fellow tourist (from France!) only to actually be a Stand user and attempts to attack Joseph with his stand – Silver Chariot. He seems like the rather eccentric and possibly crazily humorous type – which is what the series needs right now. I have to say that even with Joseph and Noriaki, the main 4 still aren’t very entertaining because Joseph doesn’t get enough screentime and Noriaki is seemingly permanently relegated to the position of a sidekick to Jotaro. Jotaro himself is still quite alright (but not kooky enough yet), but Avdol……yeah. I mentioned this last week, but I guess I’ll say it again. He’s boring.
The fight between this new stand user and the rest haven’t really started out yet, but I’m guessing Pierre (the new guy) fights it out with Avdol judging by the episode previews, so this’ll be a good chance for Araki to redeem himself by making Avdol more interesting. Not much else this week, so enjoy the rest of the screencaps I took watching this episode and try to figure out who is my new Jojo bias!