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It’s finally here, the video game that anime and manga fans have been drooling over for months: Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: All Star Battle. And better yet, our resident manga fan and gamer extraordinaire Kuzo managed to grab us one of the “Gold Experience Box” sets, which comes with a heap of limited edition Jojo merchandise.

Join us after the jump as we rip into this box of delights!

With more than 500,000 pre-orders, the PlayStation 3 game became Amazon Japan’s top-ranked title a week before its official release, assuring its maker CyberConnect2 and publisher Namco Bandai Games that it would be a commercial success before even a single member of the public had inserted the disc into their console.

The game ships with a cast of 32 characters from the Jojo universe on day one, with online campaign modes promising further unlocks and additional characters to play as. Featuring an intentionally rough, hand-drawn look, the game plays much like other three-dimensional one-on-one fighters such as Tekken and Soul Calibur, with each of the characters coming with “stylish moves” and accompanied by their supernatural “Stand” companions.

Check out the game in action in the following video. We’ll think you’ll agree that the game’s developers have done a superb job of capturing the spirit of the original manga and anime.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC6n-6J_anY#t=147

We’re not usually fans of special edition game boxsets, but on account of the anime having a special place in our otherwise cold, unfeeling hearts we decided to push the boat out just this once and pre-order one of the limited Gold Experience Box sets, and it really is something to behold for any Jojo fan. Even if it does cost a potentially wife-infuriating 16,980 yen (US$173).

Included in the sleek black box you’ll find a bevy of goodies including an original soundtrack CD, a superbly detailed figure model of Jotaro Kujo and his Stand, Star Platinum, complete with a display stand, and of course the highly anticipated game itself. We also snagged a pre-order code which gives us access to additional character taunts.

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▼ The game on the left and a mysterious (bizarre?) white box.

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▼ Underneath which we found the soundtrack CD.

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▼ Let’s take a look inside.

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▼ Huh?

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▼ It’s a massacre! We didn’t know we’d have to put the figures together ourselves!

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▼ But thankfully it didn’t take us all that long.

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▼ And, as it turns out, these things look pretty good!

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All in all, we can definitely recommend this box set to any hardcore fans of the series. It’s by no means the most original offering we’ve ever seen, but the quality of the included extras really is first-rate, and we’re sure the figures would look great as part of any collection. Quite whether the set is worth $173 is really up to the individual we suppose, but we have to admit that we’re glad we laid down the cash for this one.

Now if you’ll forgive us, we’ve got to go and duke it out on the game itself to decide who gets to take all this stuff home!

Reference: Bandai Namco Games (Japanese)
Video via YouTube nbgi
[ Read in Japanese ]