Flailthroughs - Jump Superstars! (Part 1)

To start my first official Flailthrough, I decided to pick a game that I had not played before, and in fact would have limited knowledge of the characters. To this end, I picked Jump Superstars, a game that has been around the house for some time unplayed.

I say limited knowledge because of the characters in it, the totality of which happens to be:

• Goku from Dragonball Z
• Nult Uzumaki from Naruto
• Kenshin Himura from Ruroni Kenshin
• Luffy from One Piece
• Yugi from Yugioh
• Light Yagami from Death Note
• Jojo from Jojo's Bizzare Adventure
• Bobobo from Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo
• Ichigo from Bleach
• Yusuke
• And finally the kid from Shaman King, whose name escapes me at this point in time, but I will call The Stoner.

I'm sure that I have/will misspelled the names, or get the series wrong, but in the true spirit of Flailthroughs I have no intention of looking them up, as that would spoil the game.



The first thing I note about this game is that it happens to be in Japanese, which is no surprise. As I understand it, a large aspect of this game is to somehow fit together panels to form comic books, thus somehow completing some sort of summoning ritual to bring forth the dread lord Azatoth... though it is possible that I have misheard this, as it comes to me secondhand.

At the title screen I am confronted with five options, the first one reading something like "J(katakana)" which I will guess has something to do with starting the game... Either that or it is insulting me, I have no way of knowing for sure. The second option is something along the lines of "(Kanji) (Katakana)" which confounds me more, though I will be vigilant. The third option consists of three simple symbols, so I have decided to pick that one first... lets see what happens...

Success!... Of a sort. I have discovered the screen where you create pages. The people shouting in Japanese, smiling, frowning, and in some cases crying, lead me to believe that that this panel likely represents the creator having some sort of nervous breakdown while designing this aspect of the game. This is a good sign so far.

At this point I have decided to make my way back to the title screen and pick the option, "J (Katakana)" to see if that will allow me to start the game... and I am met with success!... I think! I tap the option, and am greeted by many fragmented masses of land, floating through the void of space... Is it possible that I picked the wrong option? Did I just destroy existence? I sure hope so, as that would make this the best game that I've played in ages.

Text that I cannot read begins to scroll by as I watch the screen flash and the worlds black out... so far it's still looking like I am the bringer of chaos and death, and I'm really enjoying myself. After a moment, a floating pirate head, the Shonen Jump logo, begins to drift through space. It is sweating and moving about nervously, possibly shocked by my destruction of all creation. It floats down to the only area of land that has not been destroyed in order to escape my demonic wrath... or possibly that's just how I see it. What can I say? I'm an optimist.

Holy shit! Sparkles and spinning disembodied heads! Is this some aspect of the game that involves playing a shell game with noggins replacing the cups? Must I search under them to find a brain? Given the characters that I see flying across the screen, I would have to believe that this game is rigged, as I saw who I believe was Luffy, Bobobo, and Nult.

I see a world map now, and I attempt to click on the flag that seems to mark my victory over this land, deciding that this would be a bit more interesting than trying to figure out the menu system for the moment. I am instantly sent down to a side view world where I am Luffy, being instructed by the floating pirate head. It now seems that this head is actually my Avatar, the planar representative of my divinity... But wait! Luffy seems to be being told that he needs to kill a cardboard box with evil eyebrows... No wonder this war ended so quickly!

... Okay, I walked into the box and died. Perhaps I'm not a very good god, but after roughly seventy-seven screens of random Japanese text with random letters and symbols thrown in, in way of instructing me what to do, suicide was the only option. But I am a just god, so I seem to have given myself another chance. Yay me! Now I will beat the tar out of that box!

Stay tuned for the next update to see what happens!