EDIT: Latest revision is up.
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Jump! Super Stars was a fighting game that had some cool ideas, and while enjoyable initially, was really quite shallow – basically another fan service anime fighter for the otaku, complete with simple combos and one button supers, etc. Jump! Ultimate Stars looks and sounds nicer, and adds new mechanics to create what initially seems like a game superior to that of its predecessor. Unfortunately, some of the hazardous game concepts present in Jump! Super Stars have evolved into disasters in this sequel.
The most notable changes include dash attacks being replaced by normal dashes (which are far more versatile) and the modifications to the help character system. Instead of their effects being activated by a touch at the cost of meter, their effects are always present and have no cost. The upside of this is that it allows you to add some simple customizations to your characters and give them abilities like triple jumping and air dashing. But unfortunately there are some help characters that are way too good, such as some that make your character automatically regenerate health over time.
Inescapable traps are another problem, most of which are caused by overpowered assists. There is this particular assist, which stuns you if you’re hit by it. Both the attack animation and the effects of stun last for a while. Even if you block it, it sets up a guard breaking move. Then, the only thing that can happen, is that you get stunned, and eat combos. Not a single character in the game has an answer for this trap. A singular purpose help character may save you, but as with most of the inescapable traps and infinite combos in this game, there is only one legitimate way out.
Assist characters could be used in hit stun in Jump! Super Stars. While the concept is amazingly retarded, in practice it did not impact too negatively on the game – but only because that game did not have any assist characters strong enough to fully exploit the broken nature of this mechanic. Not only has it been retained in the sequel, it’s far worse because the assists are overpowered. For example: Sena assist could break your combos in Jump! Super Stars, but all that would happen is that your movement would be slowed down. In Jump! Ultimate Stars, Sena assist can still break your combos, except he completely stuns you. There are equally broken assists (Trunks, Seiya, the list goes on) that allow you to break your opponent’s combos, and then proceed to combo your opponent! What this all means is; when your opponent has meter, hardly anything you can do is safe, even on hit! Developer Ganbarian has taken the worst concept from any fighting game I’ve ever played and amplified it to game ruining status.
And while this assist system may seem to fix the problems with the aforementioned inescapable traps and combos, it just brings more problems. It severely limits the options of every single character, severely reducing character diversity - and ultimately, complexity – from a game that was already pretty shallow.
As far as the characters themselves go, most of the cast is pretty balanced but there are a few characters at the top that are just too powerful. A good example is Raoh. The reason he’s so strong, (besides having good stamina and some of the best combos in the game) is because his up Y attack has ridiculously good priority and a huge hit box, and this move alone rapes most of the cast. Most characters in the game don’t have an answer for it, besides, you guessed it, having the right assist character.
A guard crush system was present in Jump! Super Stars where your guard would be broken if you blocked for too long. Much to my amusement, in Jump! Ultimate Stars you can remain blocking indefinitely just by rapidly tapping down on the d-pad! It’s not like this is hugely detrimental to the enjoyment of the game or anything - it just makes me wonder if they even played this shit before they decided to put it on shelves!
At first, Jump! Ultimate Stars seems to have a promising premise. There are some nice improvements from Jump! Super Stars, most of the stages look nicer, the music is generally more energetic (bar recycled tracks), inclusion of online mode is a big plus and some of the new character designs are excellent (such as Bankai Ichigo). But it is ultimately ruined by over powered assists/characters and the ridiculous situations they create. While the ability to use assists in hit stun may seem like a solution to this problem, it brings an even greater one and the end result is simply not fun. If these problems were removed, than Jump! Ultimate Stars could at least be a playable fighting game.
But what we get instead, is a frustrating game where none of your fucking moves are safe, even on hit. When both players are willing to capitalize on what is available and play for victory (Note: This is rare these days because most of the remaining Jump! Ultimate Stars community has silly beliefs regarding “cheapness” and “honour.”), matches mostly consist of A) Two players constantly firing a barrage of assists at each other B) Two players constantly tapping down trying to bait each others assists, or C) Two players jumping around the screen and using an assist whenever the other player comes near.
This makes Jump! Ultimate Stars an inferior game to its predecessor, despite being less vanilla. Whatever improvements Ganbarian made in this sequel end up being irrelevant once you get your skills to a level where you can understand just how broken the game mechanics are. After that, Jump! Ultimate Stars is capable of appealing to only one audience: Anime fags who think a good game is anything where they can pick Naruto and ignorantly mash buttons.