You can assign them to other battle characters so you can quickly switch in and out or map them to support characters for team up attacks. New to Jump Ultimate Stars is a “leader” system where you select which battle character you want to come out first and what you want the shoulder buttons to do. If Kazuki from Buso Renkin is running low on life you can switch to Train from Black Cat and have a whole new life bar. Larger koma pieces are battle koma and you can switch between characters by tapping on them. Ryoma Echizen from Prince of Tennis can jump in to hit tennis balls at your opponents and you can call Light Yagami from Death Note for backup support. You can touch these panels to summon support characters to come in and attack. In Jump Ultimate Stars battles take place on the top screen while the bottom screen has your koma deck, a montage of manga panels. The super bar also serves another purpose, it can be used to summon support characters. Naruto uses the Rasengan as his super move, Goku fires the Kamehameha and Luffy does a flurry of punches.
X is used for super moves that take up a full bar of energy. You have basic punches and kicks mapped to B and Y respectively. The fighting system in Jump Ultimate Stars is more similar to Smash Brothers than a complex game like Street Fighter III. Most of the game you’re going to be battling other characters in manga pages. While there are an abundance of new fighters, Jump Ultimate Stars hasn’t strayed too much from the first game. Naruto has been updated to have post time skip characters and this is the first time a “grown up” Naruto is playable.
Other series have been changed like Bleach which has four playable characters opposed to just Ichigo in Jump Super Stars. New additions include Saint Seiya (Knights of the Zodiac), Fist of the North Star, Cobra and Kinnikuman (Ultimate Muscle). There are 41 different properties in Jump Ultimate Stars, compared to Jump Super Stars there are 14 additional series. Stepping into the Kenshin world and you’re up against Rurouni Kenshin. When you highlight the Dragonball planet you enter the manga and fight Goku, Vegeta and Freeza.
Each manga property is actually in its own world. After you get the basics down you can enter a black hole and see the fragmented parts of the Jump Universe.
The first few missions are spent learning how to switch characters from you koma deck and how to do special moves like the dream combo. Luffy and Naruto are in your team as you explore the J-Galaxy. Jump Ultimate Stars begins only with a handful of playable. Now it’s up to you to put it back together. Each separate Shonen Jump world has fallen apart and is scattered throughout the J-Galaxy. This year Nintendo has a sequel, Jump Ultimate Stars out for the Nintendo DS. While the properties were a key selling point, Jump Super Stars was a fairly good fast paced fighting game. Manga fans loved they could set up dream matches between their favorite characters.
This was the first time a game brought together so many Shonen Jump properties in one title. The manga mash up fighter came out for the Nintendo DS and it filled the void of fighting games on the handheld. Last year Nintendo and Ganbarion, who made some of the One Piece fighting games, teamed up to make Jump Super Stars.