1 - Prologue
(originally posted February 20, 2024)
I am reconstructing this LP from old Cohost posts. Here's hoping it works out.
The first thing we see upon hitting new game is the final boss from The Final Fantasy Legend. Off to hell of a start here.
Just kidding! Everyone's favorite Victorian oil baron, Robert Edward O. Speedwagon, is here to tutorialize. If you ask him to, he'll explain the basic controls, the Badge of Honor system, and Friendship Points, but I can get to those as they become relevant. We can also choose a difficulty level; I'll be playing everything on Normal.
I'm writing this before putting the intro post live. Here's hoping people are actually voting, because this is probably the coolest element of 7SU. Hell, here's hoping I follow through with this in any meaningful capacity.
(...the mouse cursor isn't there much longer)
We fade out, then back in on a salvage ship on the Atlantic Ocean in 1983.
Crane Operator: What are you waiting for? Open it!
Man in Diving Gear: I told you! There's bound to be good stuff here, considering this is where a luxury liner went down 100 years ago...
Bald Man: Who cares?! Just hurry up and open it!!
Bald Man: We'll force it open, then! Hey, you! Grab me a blowtorch!
The men huddle around the oddly coffin-shaped box, utterly clueless of horror tropes. Crane Operator's cousin might've heard of Dracula like, one time at a party. Sounded fake.
Days later...
Investigator: All we've found is an empty container that was left on the deck... It seems to have been forced open with an acetylene torch...
Investigator: ...No clue as to the whereabouts of its former contents. We are requesting that a search team for the lost crewmembers be dispatched ASAP!
I give it a 33 out of 100; "JoJo" and "Adventure" are nowhere to be seen. We encourage you to apply again at next opportunity.
Investigator: The chest is made of reinforced steel, so whatever was in here had to be important...
Investigator A is great at parties.
Inspector B down by the wall - hidden by the text boxes - has vanished during this exchange.
They left the title card in monochrome.
I first played 7SU version 2.5.3, which was fully in Game Boy style black-and-white. There's certainly a charm to the look, and I was originally going to use it for this project, but the siren song of 2.6 R's no random encounters and lowered NG+ requirements simply couldn't be ignored.
I'm getting ahead of myself here, but a weirdly large amount of 7SU's features are gated behind beating the game a certain number of times. That'll show me to start a project with unrealistic scope, I guess.
We fade into what's meant to be an airport gate but kind of looks like a shipping depot instead. I blame the colors. (Eagle eyed readers may spot a couple of non-Part 3 cameos. These are much easier to pick out in the color version, jeez.)
An older man in Indiana Jones cosplay walks in from his plane, greeted by a middle-aged woman.
Meet Joseph Joestar: grandson of Part 1's Jonathan Joestar and himself the protagonist of Part 2. I haven't gotten to JoJoLion or JOJOLands yet, but Joseph probably could claim the most bizarre adventures out of any JoJo.
If memory serves me right, Joseph's day job is some kind of international real estate mogul; it doesn't really ever come up. Point is, he's a mega-rich white business executive who can take a two-month globetrotting vacation whenever he wants and literally fought shoulder-to-shoulder alongside Nazis.
He is also racist towards Japanese people. Primarily Holly's husband, Sir-Not-Appearing-In-This-Game.
This is meant to be her hugging him.
Last time he was here to save the day, the Earth almost got taken over by ancient vampires, so, I mean. How much worse could it get?
The dark-skinned man sitting off to the side stands up to leave with Joseph and Holly.
Joseph's grandson is in the second-widest jail cell on Earth and provided with dozens of luxuries as part of his rehabilitation. It's an Italian form of penal therapy, based on an experimental prison in Naples.
Warden: If anyone finds out about this, I'll be fired in a heartbeat...!
Meet the main protagonist of Part 3: Jotaro Kujo, 6-foot-5, 181 pounds of muscle... and 17 years old.
Jonathan was a proper English gentleman full of Justice and Joseph was a consummate trickster, but Part 3 - as the first JoJo arc set contemporaneously - takes cues from the "yankii" / "delinquent" genre that was popular at the time (see also its Weekly Jump comrades Rokudenashi Blues, YuYu Hakusho, and Slam Dunk).
When you think about shonen manga being aimed at boys in the 9-18 age bracket, the recurring theme of protagonists being listless or rebellious teens who nevertheless find purpose in a sport or job uniquely suited to their talents (the talents in question often being Big and Strong) makes a lot of sense. However there's still something deeply comedic to me about Jotaro being introduced shotgunning a Heineken by stabbing the can with a pen in a jail cell.
I was going to make a joke about how this is a poor family dynamic, but I've seen way more poor family dynamics than healthy ones in my life. This probably hovers somewhere around fair-to-good.
Fifteen hours on a plane and this is the thanks he gets. And this is right before Japan Airlines banned smoking on international flights! It must have sucked!
Fun fact: a lot of long-distance plane routes cut northward towards the arctic circle because the diameter of Earth's sphere is simply shorter and therefore more efficient to travel. Some also fly in a straight shot over the North Pole, though this is less common now after Russia cut off their airspace due to their fuckery in Ukraine.
It happens much less over the South Pole, due to poor weather and the fact there are way fewer airports to divert to in case of an emergency.
Joseph steps aside, allowing his heretofore silent cohort to take center stage.
Meet Muhammad Abdul (known as Avdol in more recent versions, but I'll go for consistency here), our third main character. Hirohiko Araki has a penchant for naming things after musicians; he's supposed to be named after Paula Abdul, highly noted solo artist and one of the original judges on American Idol.
Flames erupt from thin air around Abdul! Spontaneous human combustion claims another victim!
Or not. A spectral man with a bird head appears behind Abdul!
Tutorial battle time!
7SU is a pretty standard turn-based JRPG. Attack is what it sounds like, though its exact properties change from character to character. Stand is for various special abilities (spells) and whatnot. Guard and Item ought be self explanatory if you have ever played an RPG in your life.
Cardiac Massage and Stone Toss are available to every character. The former is a basic revival skill (no need to hoard Phoenix Downs), and the latter is a basic physical attack that works at medium range. Loud Yell cures the Confusion status.
Magician's Red wraps tendrils of fire around Jotaro's limbs!
All Roman centurions were purple-skinned male strippers in loincloths, just so you know.
It shoves Magician's Red away!
Metal... Gear? Stand... combat?
Here Joseph explains how ranges work in battle. Every Stand in the game is innately Short, Medium, or Long range; Jotaro's is Short. In general, Short range attacks are going to be the most powerful, but they drop off hard the second an enemy is even in Middle range, let alone Long. Conversely, Long range skills work decently well even at close range, but usually cost quite a bit more SP.
Jotaro now has the famous Ora-ora punch rush attack in his Stand menu. Unfortunately, with Abdul at Medium range it barely hits harder than a standard attack; something like 5-6 damage. Meanwhile, throwing a pebble...
This is the most annoying element of the battle system in 7SU, because an opponent's distance from you is up entirely to the whims of the RNG. Abdul is meant to get up in your face here so you can beat on him, but he didn't at all when I took this footage.
I fucking lose the tutorial battle. Auspicious beginnings for this project.
Having definitely not gotten his ass beat, Jotaro goes in for the kill... but Avdol dismisses his Stand and turns his back.
Melting metal doesn't make it poof into steam! It just means now there's molten steel everywhere!
A mother knows. (So does CLAMP.)
Holly cannot be defeated. She's just so happy her two favorite big boys are finally in the same room together. This is family bonding, right here.
JoJo being a comic for kids, Jotaro immediately switches to using the correct terminology. I always thought it was goofy how - for example - in Digimon, the kids always perfectly remember the name for every single form. I always had to be told shit a few times for it to stick.
Who exactly is this "Dio", and why is he our mortal enemy? Perhaps you already know, but we'll find out next time...
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