Jump Force Deluxe Edition review for Nintendo Switch: A mixed bag

Jump Force makes the leap to Nintendo Switch with a wealth of anime characters.

Title: Jump Force Deluxe Edition
Developer: Spike Chunsoft
Publisher: Bandai Namco Entertainment
Platforms: Nintendo Switch (reviewed on)
Release Date: August 28, 2020

While Jump Force has been out for other consoles since February of last year, Nintendo Switch owners are finally getting the chance to experience this truly bizarre game thanks to the recent release of the Deluxe Edition.

Jump Force, for those who don’t know, is a 3D, 3-on-3 fighting game that features tons of various characters from the different anime properties that are often featured in Shōnen Jump magazine. The game was originally released in celebration of last year’s 50th anniversary of the celebrated manga mag. Jump Force Deluxe Edition now brings the game to Nintendo Switch with all of the previously released DLC characters from the Season 1 Character Pass included.

The story for the game is weird and absolutely nothing out of place for the world of anime. Something has created a bleed between universes (or Jump Worlds in case you forgot what you were playing) and characters from different animes have started to meet each other and team up to fight whatever crazy evil is calling it with their dark minions named “Venoms”.

You play as a custom-created with a surprising wealth of customization options. You can literally make your character look like anything from any of the various anime universes. Personally, I made a purple-haired, straight-faced woman that can be shown in the following picture punching a child in the face.

As I never played the game until now, the one thing that truly stood out to me is that it’s both beautiful and hideous all at once. When you first start the game you’ll witness surprisingly gorgeous landscapes and really well-detailed cityscapes. And the second thing you’ll notice is how bizarre and strange a lot of the characters look when you bring them into this realistic looking world.

You’re not going to find Goku from Dragon Ball or Jotaro from Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure mutated into a more realistic human. They will come from their universe, as is, and get rendered with real textures and lighting while maintaining their true form.

For characters like the more realistic Jotaro or even some of the Dragon Ball characters, this is actually a pretty cool look as you can see here from a cutscene containing Freiza.

But as you continue into the wealth of characters the game features, you start to see ones that are completely bizarre-looking, like the massive chrome orbs that make up the eyes of Yugi from Yu-Gi-Oh (yep, he’s in there) or the incredibly ghoulish look of Luffy from One Piece. Turns out Luffy in the real world just looks like a Resident Evil baddie.

Upon making your character and Jumping into the game, you enter a world of 3-on-3 battles. One of the cool things about this game is that all of your characters share a single life bar. So while switching up your characters is cool for team-up attacks and going from brawlers to ranged, it’s not going to save you health-wise. You could have All Might fight until the very last sliver of health only to tag in Vegeta and have him die in one hit.

Surprisingly, even with a single health bar, these matches can be surprisingly long and that’s okay. The fights are really pretty and fun, especially if you take the time to work on your custom character, who can learn the signature moves of almost everyone in the game. My character, for example, can knock a character back with one of Bisquit Krueger’s big punches followed up by a massive projectile I learned from Majin Buu. It’s wonderful.

Now for the rough bits though. While the game is often very pretty, it does have some rough patches. When playing in handheld mode on the Switch, the game will get incredibly jaggy at moments and take a big graphical hit. This happened a few times in docked mode as well just nowhere near as often.

If you choose to play the game in online mode, you get to see other people’s interesting and goofy-looking characters running around the lobby, but the game lags into the ground. I suffered from two different game crashes while playing and had a couple of moments where there were so many people gathered around the shops that I literally couldn’t target the shopkeeper to talk to them.

But the pros definitely outweigh the cons as Jump Force Deluxe Edition is truly a unique game that shows a lot of love for the majority of the characters it features. As you meet characters, like Baruto from the Naruto series and Ryo Saeba from City Hunter, you actually get a feel for them. You’ll witness Baruto almost dive headlong into battle without help because he wants to impress his dad. You’ll witness Ryo try and fail to hit on One Piece‘s Boa Hancock. It does this with almost all of its characters, not just throwing them into a game as game pieces but actually letting you understand each of their personalities for a bit.

A copy of this game was provided to App Trigger for the purpose of this review. All scores are ranked out of 10, with .5 increments. Click here to learn more about our Review Policy.