I Need to Explain a Tweet I Did

A few days ago I took control of the O3C Twitter to proclaim:

I’ve been thinking about it ever since, and wanted to dive in a little further.

I’m relatively new to Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. I powered through the first two seasons of the anime at the start of the year, when my shifts at my old job were getting cancelled with the ferocity that twats like Ricky Gervais can only dream of.

Depressed and purposeless, I found great comfort and connection with the first Jojo - Jonathan Joestar - as the insidious Dio Brando sought to steal his birth-right and ascend to eternal vampiric tyranny. Just as Jonathan would overcome the great challenges that lay before him, I too would break free of my misery! It’s not quite destroying a megalomaniacal vampire with the power of your life energy, but I did defeat the towering wraith that is zero hour work by getting an ‘enjoyable’ job that offered the basic dignity of a fixed contract.

I’m obsessed with JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure and I hope to be for a very long time. Not because it got me through a tough time, but because the profound joyfulness of it and the constant theme of people doing and being the best that they can be, is concurrent with positive changes I’m making in my own life. It’s also full of insane superpowered ghosts, incredible fight scenes, and masterful intrigue. I cannot get enough of it.

Which is a shame because I’ve watched all the anime that is available to this point. Instead of releasing new episodes weekly, Netflix is handling the production of JoJo’s newest story arc Stone Ocean a little differently and releasing episodes in clumps. We’ve had 12 episodes already, we’ll get another 12 in October, and I assume the last 12 in 2023. I have two conjoined theories as to why they’re doing this:

  1. Netflix has gone down the shitter and is dragging out Stone Ocean to bleed fans dry of another 2 years worth of subscription money, and;

  2. They’re padding out Stone Ocean because the next series, Steel Ball Run, is going to take fucking decades to animate (reason: nobody likes drawing horses)

So, champing at the bit, I thought I’d get a head start and read the Steel Ball Run manga. I’m about 40 chapters in and I cannot believe I’ve slept on it for so long. It’s a masterpiece. A loose adaptation of The Cannonball Run set in 1890’s America, we see participants from all over the globe compete in a coast-to-coast race across the continental United States for Big Money. But there are dark and powerful forces at work behind the scenes, and not every racer is who they appear to be…

Like I said I’m only 40 chapters into the manga and am fully prepared for the last half to completely blindside me with some insane story development, but so far the basic structure has been (and will be, if it carries on the way it has so far):

  1. Participants race to the next checkpoint

  2. Along the way overcome challenges and/or monster-of-the-week style foes (dude who can go back in time 6 seconds, someone who can create were-dinosaurs etc)

  3. Character backstory

  4. Interesting MacGuffin collection I won’t spoil

Incredible structure! Wonderful storytelling! And naturally, it got me thinking: this would make a fucking amazing video game.

Famistu gave All Star Battle, a fighting game take on JoJo’s characters a legendary 40/40 back in 2013, and in the right hands the franchise has the material to make something equally fantastic. …hence my earlier tweet this week.

But… A racing game? With combat elements? With story? With character development? This can’t be the first time this has been attempted, I thought to myself. There must be a reason why developers aren’t getting into bite fights to claim this OP, and then it hit me.

Ride to Hell: Retribution.

I assume the 1% is the score!

Widely touted as the worst video game ever made, Ride to Hell is an utterly crap game about some biker getting revenge on another bike gang after they killed his little brother or something. If that sounds good then please watch some gameplay footage. It’s horribly made, buggy, devoid of any sympathetic characters, objectifies women, has horrible combat, terrible driving mechanics, and so on. But it follows that same story progression that Steel Ball Run does, just without doing anything positive with its concept wrapper.

Drive somewhere, get into a gunfight, watch a cutscene, leap back on the ‘hog’ and repeat. It’s terrible. It sounds like it would make at least a 6/10 in the modern games press, but trust me, it’s abhorrent.

So does that mean a Steel Ball Run game would be as well?

I’d say a firm no. Ride to Hell is the worst example of a racing game split up with combat and cutscenes. We’ve got things like Saints Row and LA Noire that fit the mould as well, with free driving sections chopping up the set pieces and story development. Hell, from what real-life Jonathan (not Joestar) has been saying about Outer Wilds on the podcast recently, that too is a strong example of the move and do gameplay loop.

Fuck! Even Diddy Kong Racing! Take a break from races to chat with that vaguely racist elephant, hunt for secrets in the overworld, or do a boss battle against a triceratops. The ebb and flow’s all there!

I know that a Steel Ball Run game is a very niche interest, and probably will never get made, but if it does, and it’s good enough to be the second franchise game to get 40/40 from Famitsu, I’ll take the fact that I called it over an OBE or any kind of nationally recognised celebratory certification any day. Let me be Johnny Joestar and overcome my paraplegia! Let me be Gyro Zeppeli and race for justice! Let me be the myriad of villainous stand users in Plants Vs Zombies style minigames or those levels in Rogue Leader where you play as Darth Vader.

(Ah I’ve made myself sad now, this game sounds amazing.)

ThoughtsMinty BoothComment