Reviews// J-Stars Victory VS+

After a brief explanation you are thrown into your first battle tutorial. Movement is a little slow and is not very responsive, which is unfortunate because you start so far away from your opponent that it’s near impossible to see them unless you target them.

There is a dash button, however, which will be your best friend if you can master it. You have the usual arsenal of light, heavy and wide area attacks as well as finishing moves. Fighting is a lot more responsive than movement. It is satisfyingly easy to pull off some impressive combos. Blocking, however, can be a bit of a pain – if you can’t get an initial block in before your enemy attacks you then you’re not able to block at all whilst their combo is in motion. A counter-attack system would have been nice here, but instead you have to look on in frustration as your character takes a beating.

Matches are won by filling a WIN gauge at the top of the screen. There are three bars to fill, and each bar is filled by defeating one enemy. A defeated enemy will re-spawn after a certain amount of time has passed, so you can lay the smackdown on one particular character a few times if you really don’t like their face.

Victory is rewarded with experience points and Jump Points (JP), which can be spent on special items and extra characters. The items didn’t give enough of an advantage to warrant buying them so most of my JP went on characters, of which I unfortunately couldn’t use in my current story mode. J-Stars cards can also be bought with bronze, silver and gold ‘coins’ to be placed into a deck which will power up your character giving you a nice advantage in battle.

Once you have gone through the tutorial and have a few victories under your belt, you unlock support role characters. All in all there are three characters – one that you control, one that fights by your side and a support character.

Depending on the character used and their temperament within their respective licenses, you can use them in battle to fight alongside you or they are assigned as a support role, to be summoned in battle whenever you wish with a small cooldown afterwards. This is a nice addition – it makes you feel less... well, lonely whilst in battle, and knowing that a few of your friends have your back inspires confidence and makes battles much more fun. Once a power bar has been filled through performing various actions you can unleash a combination attack called Victory Burst, which will activate certain ultimate attacks depending on which supporting characters you have with you.

As well as story mode there are many other modes – Free Battle, Arcade Mode, Online Battles and a nice addition called Victory Road, which is a mode in which you fight in consecutive battles against some of the toughest enemies in the game – a great addition for those who love to test the limits of their abilities (or those who just love a good rage quit).

Overall, the game feels quite rushed, with the main focus being on the battles and everything else feels like it has just been thrown in there for good measure. The environments are very well modelled, lending a nice atmosphere to the game, but the character models are not as well done and the lip-syncing is terrible even though it’s with the original Japanese voices, and even these are limited to a few phrases.

The dull English text has a hard time fitting in with all the wonderful bold original graphics. But... the simplistic awesomeness of the battles and the impressive roster of all these great characters overshadows these shortcomings to create a pretty decent and enjoyable fighting game. All in all, I feel that this is a game that mostly only Otakus will garner some sort of satisfaction from.

As for finding that certain revelation-gaining something – it looks like my search will continue…

Pros:
+ Great Character lineup
+ Beautiful environments
+ Nice fast paced fun battles

Cons:
- Lacklustre storyline
- No inspiration to keep playing
- Dat lip sync tho

SPOnG Score: 7/10