I love JoJo’s Bizzare adventure, it’s ridiculous campy nonsense and it’s great. Stardust Crusaders felt like  bit of a step down though, there were definitely some great fights there, but a lot of the Stands were just various flavours of mystical punch ghost, and it felt drawn out at times. Diamond is Unbreakable feels like a jump back up to peak JoJo.

The rules of Stands were already pretty arbitrary, Diamond is Unbreakable embraces this,  throwing them out of the window a lot of the time in service of interesting matchups. It also manages to feel less like just a series of boss fights than Stardust did, despite still more or less being that.

Unlike DIO, who was essentially just an offscreen presence for the entirity of Stardust, Kira is a constant throughout the second half of the series; And this makes him a heck of a lot scarier. Some of the best parts of the show were just Kira trying not to murder whilst in hiding. Dio and Kars were given free right to be ridiculously, gleefully evil, Kira’s more restrained villiany was a nice change.

The switch to Hayato as the focus of penultimate arc was really refreshing as well, JoJo bystanders tend to be ignored entirely, so it was neat to see things from another angle. The whole part felt like a more interesting take on Stands as a concept, and it pays off.

It was nice to consistently look forward to JoJo again, and I’ll definitely miss those weekly visits to Morioh. Time to wait for part 5.