A friend of mine told me that he though Jump Force was just a shameless cash grab, and he is right. While the game does have some fun aspects of it, it feels like the game was just rushed out because you know, they needed to have something for this particular round zero in the age cycle of Shounen Jump. So let me dive right in and get to the details.

Let us start small and build up. First, you have the fact that your custom character looks like crap. I am not sure how Bandai managed this, but the custom avatar that you are allowed to make looks terrible. Given how pretty the rest of the game is, this is a real let down. I also do not really feel like the character is all that custom anyway. Not just because it looks like crap, but also because of the fact that all of the clothes only appear to be cosplay, I get that is part of the reason to play the game, but... it would have been nice to have a few original designs. So that is a huge letdown, you get bored of seeing all the Namis and Dark Magician Girls in the hub.

Then there is the shared life and power bar. You get to choose three characters, but they all share the life bar and the ki bar. Which really takes any strategy out. I commonly use the first character I picked. After all, the only reason to change characters might be to gain a new super move. Then there is the awakening bar, that lets you transform and use your ultimate move. This is primarily used to help someone who is losing come back. From what I have seen how much the bar charges is directly tied to how much damage you have taken. So if you are crushing someone, you do not get to obliterate them with a super move. I miss that about Xenoverse I could toy with a computer character and then smash them with my ultimate attack 3 or 4 times just for my amusement. That does not happen in this game, and it would have made it more fun.

The story is a bore as well. First, off you are tricked into thinking you might have some kind of decision-making process in the game, no the only thing the decision does is give you a starting set of super moves. It is pick your favorite characters move set, One Piece, Naruto, or Dragonball. Then you can run around and buy whatever moves you want after that. Even worse the story progresses slowly, and I am stuck in a pattern of, some story, save someone, some more story, rescue people, and the story does not progress till you go save people. I guess it is supposed to help me level up, but I am way more interested in the story than I am in who is being taken over and stuff.

Now, let us whine about the fact that it is not 100% voice acted. Yup, when you are doing your saving missions you are not going to hear anything, you have to sit there and read. This gets to be really frustrating, had they put a few extra pennies into the game it would be that much better. Sadly, those few sentences kind of ruin things for me as well. It is nitpicky but come on you have 50 gigs to work with. I would understand a bit more if there was an English voice cast, but there is none, it is all Japanese that frees up tons of space.

The final nail in the coffin is the loading times. Maybe they are better on the Xbox One, but I would not hold my breath, the game tries to make this intense story, but when I am sitting there between scene transitions for up to a minute, it gets to be painful. At first, I thought it was the fact that I have the install data on a separate HDD, but nope the load times do not speed up if you move it, so there is that.

So yes overall this game is a shameless cash grab. What happened to the success of the DS game all those years ago? If they only tried a bit harder to make the game better, it would be more fun. So I am having a hard time recommending this game to anyone at the moment, which is upsetting because I want them to keep making special games like this one. However, I cannot recommend you buy this game. If Jump had started developing this game right after the end of the 45 anniversary and put effort into making a good story and optimizing it, so it runs fast. The game would have been an enormous success, but sadly it is going to flop because there are not enough die-hard fanboys out there to pick it up. I guess they wanted to appeal to the freshmen fans in the group more. Oh well, at least I have the story right?