This was shown off at the recent Nintendo Partner Direct, thought I think it was shown off in other places before. I was pretty curious about it as it looked pretty interesting. I realized pretty quick that it used Jump characters, specifically from Jump+, though none of them I was particularly familiar with outside of Spy X Family. I wondered what “Captain Velvet Meteor” was though, as that wasn’t a Jump character. This video from 10 years ago is literally all I could find (of course made by one of the devs of the game). So basically Shueisha gave their licenses to a pretty small studio to make a game using their characters… That’s certainly not something you see every day.

So I picked this up and it was a nice quick weekend game alongside Frogun.

So let’s go and see if it’s good!

Developer: Momo-pi Game Studio
Publisher: Shueisha Games
Release date: July 28, 2022
Platforms: Switch
Genre: Turn-based Strategy

Review

Damien is a young french (half-japanese I guess) boy who is forced to move to Japan by his parents after his grandfather passed away, and he’s not too happy about the change. On one of the first days there, he’s given a few tasks to do in the house (alongside preparing for going to a new school) while his parents are away. As a sterotypically imaginative boy, every task makes him freak out a bit and he imagines himself as his OC, Captain Velvet Meteor, a space hero who becomes stranded on an unknown planet. So every task he does in real life is kinda replicated in his imagination, but going a bit over-the-top. For example, one of the tasks is to… eat weird japanese food for breakfast, including Natto. So the final boss of that area is a big Natyo monster with weird ingredients in it. Basically it’s about his struggle with being in a new environment, encountering things he’s unfamiliar with. In these tasks, he teams up with characters from Jump+ manga, who were drawn into this unknown planet just like him, and the goal on the imagination side of things is to help all these other characters return home after fixing the ship. Not a bad story, it actually goes in line with the original animation from 10 years ago and goes through something we’ve all gone through at some point.

One thing that does “bother” me a little bit is the integration of Jump+ characters. You have Loid from Spy X Family which is the only series here I’m actually familiar with. Other than him there’s Slime from Slime Life, Kafka from Kaiju No. 8, Ushio from Summer Time Rendering, Gabimaru from Hell’s Paradise: Jigokuraku, Chrome from Heart Gear, Princess from ‘Tis Time for “Torture,” Princess (that’s a weird title) and Chloe Love from Ghost Reaper Girl. They seem to show off the personality of the characters pretty well, and you get a very cursory idea of what their series is about in some cases, but overall the characters are just kinda there. I have no idea what Summer Time Rendering, ‘Tis Time for “Torture,” Princess and Slime Life might be like based on their characters here… and honestly if Spy X Family wasn’t this big well-known thing you’d know nothing about it from playing this game (you’d know he’s a spy and… that’s it). Like… it’s cool they’re here, and I’m sure fans of those mangos are happy to see those characters in a game, but I feel they should be a bit more… involved? Better utilized? They spend most of the game just hanging around on your spaceship, as each character just has one chapter to go through and then they become pretty much just decoration. It didn’t REALLY give me the desire to read any of these manga just based on what we saw here. TBH the most interesting one to me was Ghost Reaper Girl… And I do know Summer Time Rendering has an anime out right now so I’ll add it to my neverending anime maybe list that I’ll never get to.

Visually I like it. In conversations they have black-and-white drawings from the manga for each of the Jump+ characters which look good, with Captain Velvet Meteor also having a similar style drawing in those segments. The monsters you fight, especially the bosses, look really cool and represent what Damien is dealing with very nicely. Actually the bosses are almost all massive and really detailed (and some make a comeback from that animation I linked to in the intro). A bit of a cartoony but twisted style. Everything’s pretty colorful, and of course graphics in games need to help the gameplay, and they do so nicely here, highlighting anything that may attack you and being clear about what you can or can’t interact with. Any complaints? Well, while the manga drawings look good, the actual gameplay sprites for the characters don’t mimic the original art style for many of them, instead being more consistent between each other (unless they’re “weird” designs in the first place like Kafka and Slime) so they can fit with Captain Velvet Meteor’s look a bit more. They don’t look bad, but they don’t look like they’d fit within their own universes. Very minor complaint.

So gameplay! This is a strategy game, but it’s a pretty unique take on the genre. In most levels you control 2 characters. First Captain Velvet Meteor, second, one of the Jump+ characters. The goal of every level is one of 2 things: killing all the enemies, or reaching a certain point on the map to get to the next level. If you open up the path to that exit AND kill every enemy, the level ends right away without having to get to the path, but basically it’s the same thing.

How this game works is that you take turns between your team and the enemies. On your turn, you get 4 movement points per character. Each character has an attack range (usually in front of them, usually a few spaces in front of them), and if an enemy or shootable target is in that range, when you hold A to end your turn, the attacks will launch. Most enemies die in one hit from your characters, though some usually bigger will take more hits (indicated by an HP bar once you hit them). Some attacks have special effects as well, such as Slime’s attack pushing targets back (also he hits all around himself) and Princess’ attack moving her to the target location.

But there’s other types of attacks here as well. If Captain Velvet Meteor and the Jump+ character get next to each other, they will instead launch a big AOE attack. That attack TENDS to be weaker than normal attacks, but of course hit more enemies. They also occasionally have extra effects. The attack with Chloe, for example, lights up the area for a few turns, which makes ghost enemies have to hide in the shadows. The attack with Gabimaru sets enemies and certain tiles on fire, causing extra damage to enemies that go through those tiles. The attack with Ushio dispels illusions. The one with Loid turns you invisible to enemies and traps. And then there’s a third type of attack. Enemies occasionally drop these yellow orbs. Getting 3 of them fills up your super meter. You launch the super attack by having your 2 characters end their turn with one behind the other (you can spin them around as needed). These tend to just being large attacks that kill everything in one hit (with a few enemies that have enough HP to survive).

There’s multiple enemy types. The most common are super-tiny group of blobs that you can kill literally by just walking on them, they’re very inoffensive and deal almost no damage when they attack. Bigger enemies take a hit to die. Some redder ones shoot from a distance. There’s some that are bull-like that see you even if you’re invisible and push you if they hit you. There’s a few types of even bigger enemies, like buddah-like statues, dudes carrying walls or shields (those don’t take, or sometimes reflect, damage from the front). In Chloe’s chapter there’s ghosts that only she can kill, but they’re inoffensive if you stay in the light and don’t get close to shadows. There’s a bunch more, like enemies that can attack you from nearly anywhere on the map (highlighting tiles that will get hit after you finish your turn), but you will notice there’s a lot of repeats between the chapters.

Then the boss battles are actually very well done. They’re more powerful than normal enemies of course, but like most well-designed bosses in gaming, they have some form of patterns they do, and either timing that reveals their weak points, or methods to reveal their weak points. Some have targets to hit with a lot of enemies spawning on the way to it, some do some AOE attack that reveals weak points to it, and so on. They’re all different, and they’re all fun to fight. I think the one I liked least is the final boss, but it’s not because it was bad, it just felt less imaginative than the rest.

I didn’t even talk about losing. Basically, both of your characters have a shared HP bar. After your turn, enemies that are alerted to your presence (just need to be close enough to you, or close to enemies that can see you) will move towards you, and any that are orthogonally adjacent to one of your characters will attack (with some that have ranged attacks and such). If you lose, you can either go back to the spaceship (which is useless to go to anyways) or restart the current level. You can recover that HP though, which is good because enemies attacks deal a lot of damage. You recover HP, very simply, by killing enemies. If you kill a bunch in one turn, you basically recover your entire HP.

There’s not much else to really talk about. You go through the 8 chapters in whichever order you want, except the final chapter of course. In-between chapters you walk around Damien’s new house, finding stickers. The stickers go in a bingo grid, and getting lines in it opens optional repeat battles against each of the bosses. If you go in a room that has one of the tasks given by your mom, you decide if you want to deal with that or go out of the room. The spaceship has nothing in it, except activating the thing in the middle to choose missions.

Overall

I enjoyed this game quite a bit. It’s a pretty cool, pretty unique take on strategy games. It’s interesting, it’s a decent challenge, and it’s fun. My only real issue with it is the use of the Jump+ characters, I was hoping for them to play a bit of a bigger role and give me a better idea of their stories. But really other than that… No problem here. It’s fun, it looks good, it even has a not-bad story which is rare for a video game.

I’d give this one a solid recommendation. Not super long, so a good weekend kinda game.