#GAME JUMP FORCE UPGRADE#
From the Jump Force HQ, which acts as your freely-explorable hub, you go out on missions, pick up quests, and upgrade your abilities. You play as your own custom character, and in very Dragon Ball XenoVerse fashion, you team up with an organisation (named Jump Force, of course) that comprises of heroes from throughout Jump history in order to save the world. The same could be said of the story, although as we've established, 'flashiness' isn't the right word to use when the game looks this confused. Once you're past the surface-level flashiness, it all gets just a bit repetitive. It's not difficult to figure out how the most damaging combos work and put them into practice, and even though each character comes with their own unique special moves, they generally play with the same rhythm and flow. That's not necessarily a bad thing for an accessible fighter like this, but it does mean that the gameplay loses a lot of its lustre after a while. There’s very little to like here.Again, though, there's no obvious depth to the combat in Jump Force. It’s the Best Bits compilation albeit with the editor’s OC inserted just for shits and giggles. Once you’ve gotten to grips with some of the more “advanced” techniques in your arsenal, you won’t come across much of a challenge. Playing Jump Force for extended periods of time just feels like you’re going through the motions. It’s hard to see what’s going on and, once you’re even ten hours in, you’ll barely care. A bevy of post-processing and particle effects fill the screen every second. Much like Xenoverse, you have basic auto-combos, four special moves, a high-powered awakening mode and a way to quickly zoom to your opponent. The actual fighting isn’t too bad, just unpolished. The awe-inspiring multiplayer boss battles of Dragon Ball: Xenoverse 2 are nowhere to be seen here – it’s just the same thing over and over again. All of this is surrounded by generic dialogue, horrendously low-fps cutscenes, and horrid animation. This game was released in the year 2018 and since then it has gained a lot of audience in just a small amount of time. Sometimes, you’ll have to fight two or three times. Jump Force PPSSPP is a fighting game that has a lot of things to do in it. You’re told there’s a disturbance, you teleport in, you fight and then you go home. Every mission consists of the same few steps. It would help then if the missions and scenarios your husk of a character took part in were anywhere near enjoyable, but they’re not. Meanwhile, in the corner, a literal God is cowering as you break his face. You can fight better than any of the actual heroes, you’re the best of the best. With so many interesting characters, it seems trivial to introduce a custom character into the mix. Not long after, during a training spar with Saint Seiya’s Shiryu, you mark his supposedly “impenetrable” shield. Early on, you manage to hold your own against Dragon Ball villain Frieza when even Goku couldn’t. In fact, the game’s myriad heroes only seem to exist for two reasons: marketability and to make your character seem cooler. There’s no sword-based basics, no guns, no stretchy limbs-everything cool is delegated to special moves.Įven more bizarre is the way in which Jump Force makes your character appear as the strongest person anyone has ever seen. Instead of being allowed to take whatever character’s move set you want for your default combos, you have a choice of three: fast attacks, slow attacks, and an in-between form. While this is all fine and dandy, Jump Force does skimp out on key aspects of character customization. As you proceed through the game’s barebones, cookie-cutter narrative you’ll get to interact with all the characters you know and love, use their classic moves as your own and even mix and match their clothes. In the same vein as Dragon Ball Xenoverse, you’re tasked with creating your own hero. It’s an anomaly then that with 40+ iconic characters already in the game’s roster, Jump Force is more focused on providing you with a unique avatar to play as. Most characters that aren’t currently caught in licensing limbo are present here. And characters you’ll get, there’s a whole host of them here: Kenshiro from Fist of the North Star, Jotaro Kujo (and Dio) from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventures and the obvious Naruto, Bleach and Dragon Ball characters. It’s a definite act of compensation instead of polish and finesse, you get character quantity. Jump Force currently feels like a multi-million dollar effort to shove as many Shonen Jump properties into one product.
With such a wide spread of characters with their own personalities, backgrounds, and histories, a game based wholly on this decades-long franchise should be worthy of the IP. It’s a cultural phenomenon iconic franchises such as Dragon Ball, Naruto, and My Hero Academia all hail from this one publisher. As the largest pillar of the manga and anime industry, Shonen Jump is an icon throughout the world for fans of Japan’s most popular media.