"Another Jump To Victory"

If you are a fan of anime and own a DS, you should definitely get this game. Jump! Ultimate Stars' roster are mainly characters from Jump!'s mangas, a few which may surprise you. This game is pretty much like Super Smash Bros. where characters beat the crap out of each other. Jump! Ultimate Stars' roster has increased drastically since the first game, Jump! Super Stars, but unfortunately, most of those characters are support and help characters.

The game reuses komas from the first game if you are familiar. Komas are Japanese manga panels with pictures of an anime character which is set on the bottom screen of the DS. The touch screen has a total of 20 slots and the komas take up those slots. Komas are arranged in many different way such as 3 tiles horizontally or vertically or a 2x2 koma. There are three types of komas: battle, support, and help which are red, blue, and green colored komas respectively. Battle komas are the characters that you use in combat that usually take up more than 4 slots. Support komas are the characters that pop out to attack, stun, blind, or poison your opponents for a moment that are usually 2 or 3 slots big. Last are the help komas which just take up one slot that boosts the stats of your battle characters. Support and help komas can "react" to some battle komas meaning, if you know your anime, some characters have a relationship with each other in some way. If you put a support or help komas next to a battle koma, you'll see like a special reaction and text of the characters talking so your battle characters now have those special stats added. The komas act as extra buttons where you hit a koma with your finger, you activate it whether it is to tag another battle character or call out a support character.

The game's fighting system is a fighting beat-em-up multiplatform game, much like a 2D SSB game with platforms and some annoying projectiles hitting you in some stages. 4 players max are allowed at fight all at once. Instead of percentages like in SSB, there are health bars and super bars which most of you players should be familiar with. If your health bar goes down, your character dies and super bars can be filled up to a level depending if you have any support characters or help characters that react with your battle and unleash a devastating super move upon your enemies.

The Galaxy Mode which is the story mode begins with a tutorial, just basically read and perform what you are told to perform to pass. The world selection is like Kingdom Hearts, if any of you played it, with a huge galaxy full of worlds. Each world is a different anime. In each world, there are several missions that must be accomplish in order to progress and open gates to new galaxies and new worlds. Each mission has at least 5 tasks and sometimes an SP one. Those tasks usually tell you to beat the crap out of your opponents, take the stars, collect this and that, ring out your opponents, and more. Galaxy mode is the only mode that allows you to unlock more komas by accomplishing your tasks. Galaxy Mode has a pre-made deck of komas with Naruto and Luffy as battle characters, Goku as support and two other help komas. You'll use them momentarily until you unlock more komas which have to be made by going into the Deck Creation mode.

Two new features that were added to this game were Koma Evolution and wifi. Koma Evolution is the mode to upgrade the komas that you've unlocked. The komas that you unlock are all help komas what can evolve to support komas and battle komas as well as increasing another line of evolution for battle komas. Some battle komas can be upgraded to at most 8 slots which are usually powerful. Some komas are the keys to unlocking more worlds for Galaxy Mode if they are upgraded.

If you think that you are the best in JUS then you can play wifi! Yay! Finally, Nintendo has incorporated wifi into this great fighting game. There are two ways to play, search for players which usually take a lot of time and friend battle which you share your friend code and battle whoever with wireless talk over your mic. The only two flaws in wifi are probably lag (of course) and cheap battlers. You'll find it very frustrating to play because your characters and everyone else is responding very slowly and if one person drops from the game, everyone else is dropped as well so you will have to search for a game again. Some players, especially hardcore Japanese fanatics, are hard to deal with because of some cheap tactics but it was a great idea that JUS has an option to save your opponents' koma decks so you can observe who they used and what they did.

Furthermore, JUS is a great fighting game but unfortunately it is only available in Japanese and cannot be released in the US because of some copyright problems. So, if you have a DS, this is a must import and one of the top fighting games for the DS.

Good controls, great graphics, awesome music, and LOTS of characters!

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 12/06/06