CHIBA, Japan – There's a right way to make a videogame based on a comic book, and there's a wrong way to do it. JoJo's Bizarre Adventure All Star Battle and Fist of the North Star Ken's Rage 2, both playable on the floor of the Tokyo Game Show this weekend, best represent these polar opposites.
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure All Star Battle is due out next year in Japan for the PlayStation 3; a foreign release or an Xbox 360 port have yet to be announced. Fist of the North Star: Ken's Rage 2 comes to PS3 and Xbox 360 in Japan on December 20 with a Wii U version and a U.S. release planned for a later date.
Let's start with the right way. JoJo's Bizarre Adventure All Star Battle, by Namco Bandai is an upcoming PlayStation 3 fighting game that looks and feels like a living comic book. The characters look as if they were drawn and inked onto the screen, and every action is punctuated with onomatopoeia – even the sound of their footsteps. It's a bit dizzying at first, bordering on information overload, but it sells the game's dedication to the source material.
Then there's the wrong way. Fist of the North Star: Ken's Rage 2 from Tecmo Koei is a sequel to the 2010 brawler based on the long-running Japanese comic Fist of the North Star. It's a spin-off of the Dynasty Warriors series.
Instead of embracing a comic-book aesthetic, Fist of the North Star: Ken's Rage 2 features a plastic cast of characters who barely resemble their hand-drawn counterparts. When the hero Kenshiro bares his chest to reveal his famed Big Dipper scars, he looks like a scratched Ken doll.
The differences are more than skin deep. The way that the gameplay reflects the source material is just as crucial.
Playing as Jotaro Kujo in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure All Star Battle, mashing the attack button during his rapid-punch moves directly affects the total hit count. It also feels terrific, because I am furiously tapping a button and beating the cartoon snot out of my opponent.
Kenshiro in Fist of the North Star: Ken's Rage 2 also has a rapid-punch attack, but it's triggered by a single button press. Even when it's part of a storyline cinema, one button begins the beating, and one button delivers the final blow. If my on-screen avatar is furiously punching a villain to death, I at least want to feel like I'm participating.
That's only one instance of a larger problem in Ken's Rage 2, which is that none of the attacks carry any weight. Once you've seen one punch explode ten hapless minions, it doesn't make killing the next 50 or 100 any more fun. That's a problem, because if the demo is any indication, mowing down chumps is most of the game. Enter closed space, face an evil horde, repeat. Every single battle in the demo was tedious, right from the start.
It almost seems unfair to compare a repetitive brawler with a one-on-one fighting game like JoJo's Bizarre Adventure All Star Battle, but that game deserves credit for making such a good first impression.
Even though it's a 3-D fighting game and I mostly play 2-D fighters, I found my skills translated to 3-D space much better than they do in titles like Tekken and Virtua Fighter. The commands were easy to pick up, and the controls were straightforward. At this point I'd even go so far to say that the game seems easier to learn than the previous JoJo's Bizarre Adventure fighter made by Capcom in the 1990s.
So while I recommend keeping an eye out for the release of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure All Star Battle, I can't say the same for Fist of the North Star: Ken's Rage 2. The latter might appeal to Dynasty Warriors fans who are just looking for more one-against-many battles to fight, but it drops the ball in capturing the appeal of the comics.
