JoJo no Kimyou na Bouken Part 6: Stone Ocean
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Part 6: Stone Ocean

Edit

What would you like to edit?

SynopsisBackgroundAlternative TitlesPictureChapters/VolumesPublishing DatesRelationsTypeExternal Links  

Women in prison. Ok, got your attention.

Featuring one of the most ridiculously tense and violent games of catch-ball ever, Stone Ocean is even better than part 5 of the JoJo saga. If Golden Wind was the zenith of the JoJo franchise, then Stone Ocean is the apex. Ok, they both mean the same thing but you get the idea.

Starring the daughter of the stoic, bland, yet incredibly powerful Jotaro, the story has jumped a few years to 2011, Florida, USA. Jolyne is in a 'pinch' as the Japanese love to say. She's on her way to a sprawling prison complex ... off of Florida, she's been framed, she's starting to hear voices in her head and a string just appeared out her finger for no apparent reason. Shit just got real.

The JoJo saga has featured a vast array of unique characters and abilities, but at its core it’s about a very simple thing. The violent clash of two bloodlines: Joestar versus Dio and his minions. Stone Ocean is no different, albeit lacking Dio himself it still carries his influence still plaguing the unlucky Joestar bloodline. Its free of the overt humour of Part 4 and after part 5's unbelievably powerful abilities, Araki himself was in a pinch, where does he go next?

So what better way to get out of it by allowing more females into his saga and using a claustrophobic locale brimming with lots of potential. A maximum security prison complex halved between females on one side and males on the other. Jolyne is thrust into a violent world with no allies, forced to learn the rules of prison society, like how to bribe people just to make a phone call.

The abilities are still named after famous artists and bands, but they're so much more offbeat and WTF-based than usual. You have to love it. The imagination on display in the JoJo saga constantly hits you in surprising ways, and you're usually left in awe at Hirohiko Araki's imagination, pitting two veteran stand-users against a newly born baby for example. You will be beaming or pumping your fist into the air at how Araki can sustain so much tension and danger to the characters, pushing them to the very limits and then pulling them out of the fire, and it never feels like a copout, he always makes their efforts to get out of danger believable and earned.

Jolyne is a good character, she's feminine yet brash like all JoJos are, she's intelligent and has a very handy ability that she uses to its full potential, regularly getting out of tight corners and giving violent beatdowns to punks who push her too far.

Stone Ocean is another great addition to the JoJo saga, a brilliant shonen that has enough horror traits to almost veer it into seinen territory. The battles are ingenious and often brutal, packed with body mutilation and as usual for an Araki manga; featuring climaxes that are the result of characters acting intelligently and not because of contrived power-ups, as seems to be the rage in the post-millennium decade.

In terms of rating the last battle of this volume to other volumes, it definitely ranks as one of the best, a vast improvement over Part 5's battle in Italy. There are crazy powers causing utter mayhem on a global scale and insane counterattacks that come from nowhere but are always consistently logical in the context of the manga.

I love the author; he always comes up with crazy solutions to crazy problems. JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is as enduring and consistently entertaining as the JoJo blood line.

I wasn't a fan of part 5, so i was hoping that this part would be better, especially because of the fact that the prison setting sounds really refreshing for jojo, but unfortunately, for me, this is the worst part so far.

The story flows quite well and the ending, while being weird, was really unique and kinda satisfying, but of course i'm talking about the story and not the last fight, the last fight was average and boring, just like the last fight in part 5. that's the problem - This part has the worst fights in any part. at least in part 5, for ... every bad fight, there was a good fight, but most of the fights in this part are average/bad. Chapters 1-20 were interesting and i was hyped to read the rest of the part, but, right after that, the quality drops heavily, when they start to introduce the main cast while i have to force myself to read boring/overly complicated fights. Especially the fight against that old man with the dragon, it was so boring that i stopped paying attention in the middle. after chapter 100 is when it got really boring to me and i was forcing myself to read it so i could finish it already. Basically, almost all of the stands in this part are boring, that's what truly made me dislike this part.

The characters are a hit and miss, just like in part 5.
Jolyne has a fun personality, definitely one of the best in the series, but her stand on the other hand is not shown a lot throughout the part and that makes her a little less enjoyable. Her being Jotaro's daughter is engaging and the interaction between them is fun as hell. i would say that she's a better character than Giorno overall.
Hermes is my least favorite out of the main ones, her backstory and the whole thing about her revenge felt forced and out of place, she's just an empty character for me.
Annasui was an ok character, his stand was bad, but his personality was nice, although they didn't really explain why he had that habit of breaking things, they didn't really expand on it. His interactions with Jolyne were a hit or miss tbh.
Pucci was an average character for me at first, but after we got his backstory, i really liked him. His objective was something weird and interesting at the same time. I was really surprised at what he did at the end, that made him an even better character, absolutely better than Diavolo.
That's all i have to say about the main characters, there are more, but i don't really have something to say about them, they're fine, i guess.

I start to think that the author was uninspired when he was making this part. even part 3, while being inconsistent, still had a lot of good fights, it's a shame that i can only name 3-4 good fights in part 6, and two of them are at the start. I'm glad that this part is supposedly the finale of parts 1-6, and that the author took a new direction with jojo, because after this part, it definitely needed that.

oh, and remember, OPINIONS :)

This review will contain spoilers

If I were to describe Stone Ocean in one word, that would be confused. To be more precise than one word, Stone Ocean feels like it doesn't know where it is going and what it wants while being forced to move in a direction. Though I may have given it a 2, I still found it to be worth reading, as I have finished it. But what good will I have towards this part is showered in complaints and confusion that made the whole 3 days journey I took reading this a very rocky road. But I can't be this vague, ... so I'm gonna try and compile my thoughts into something digestible, and maybe people that disagree with my stance can at least come to an understanding of my viewpoint.

So to start, I feel a story is based in the strength of it's characters. That doesn't mean that a good story needs good characters, but that is the lens of which the narrative is told. The triumph of Giorno in part 5 was only special because we saw all the hardship Buccellati's gang had to go through, as well as the connection made between them along the way. So in my opinion, the cast of Stone Ocean is really bad. Jolyne and friends don't really get to know each other, as much as they are around each other. Hermes is just a girl, and she killed Sports Max so thats the end of that development. I can't name a single thing unique to Emporio as a character other than that he is a child with the ghost room stand. Weather Report is kind of neat with his connection to Pucci and all. Annasui is just a simp for Jolyne, which is more interesting than Emporio and Hermes. Jolyne is not a good MC, as her motivation is very poorly defined, and she just left very little impression on me. The best character in part 6 is probably F.F., a microorganism gaining life and expanding her understanding of the world past Pucci's role for her was really cool, and her death is something I wished happened a little bit later so we would get more time to flesh her out. Jotaro is gone for almost the entire part which sucks, but I guess he's too OP. And Pucci is uh... ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...

Pucci sucks ass, in both implementation and execution. First he relies on Dio for motivation, which make it the second time Dio is used in some form in the big bad of the series. Now I could be biased in the fact that I have Stardust Crusaders and Phantom Blood as my least favorite JoJo parts, but even if I were to ignore that, it just makes Pucci boring. Diavolo and Kira were both interesting antagonists that challenged the protagonists in an interesting thematic way, which is something I cannot say for Pucci. Secondly, his whole plan is never clear until literally the last fucking chapter. So it starts with Jotaro's stand disc to find what was in Dio diary, then it changes to the green baby, which then becomes going to this Nasa place where gravity gets all weird, and then he resets the universe. It's all handled so messily as plot point sorta just converge until all our main guys are near Pucci and then they fight and its not earned in the slightest. Third, Dio's children are dumb and stupid. I don't think I need to explain this one, but even if you could, I just don't like them. In general, I feel the encounters with Pucci don't have any weight to them like the villain encounters did in other parts. Kira was hidden amongst the crowd of Morioh, keeping everyone alert after his reveal. Diavolo was known to be in the colosseum during Chariot Requiem. Pucci is just in the prison wandering around, theres no weight to his encounters, they just sorta happen, except during the fight with F.F.'s death which was actually pretty decent.

Speaking of which, the prison setting is just way too restrictive. I feel bribing guards and whatever can only happen so many times that your suspension of disbelief is going to be broken at some point. Like in any of the fights, were they at least caught on camera doing shit like jumping around in antigravity, or executing someone by throwing a baseball at them 1000 times, or when survivor turned the whole ultra security section into a battle royale. And the tight corridors is just too controlling when it comes to spacing and really hampers the grasp on any particular enemy.

I feel most of the fights suck in part 6, because it sorta has the part 3 problem of sorta just ending when our heroes find one solution to the problem, instead of having momentum swing back and forth like parts 2 and 5. I liked the ending that was neat, and uh thats it.

I think though the the one reason i was able to stick it out to the end though was the fact that it is JoJos. And not that it's part of a pre-existing saga, more of that it looks and feels like the parts of old. The body horror is absolutely fantastic, the stands are neat, the character designs are gorgeous. It's Jojo, through and through, and thats why I can't give it a 1, because it's still worth reading if you're into Jojo. But yeah I hope this was helpful see yah.