Like all Shounen Jump-inspired games, Jump Force piqued the interest of many fans of anime and manga, and it’s continuing to make the news with frequent announcements of new characters for its crazy battle royale.
While it’s not the ultra-popular kind of battle royale that everyone is talking about nowadays, there’s always something fascinating about a game mixing shounen franchises, at the very least to solve the usual “who would win between Dragon Shiryu and Kenshiro?” discussions.
In order to learn more about the philosophy behind the game, DualShockers talked to Producer Koji Nakajima, who shared a number of interesting details, especially on the visual style.
The game has been announced for PS4, Xbox One, and PC, which of course prompted the customary question about the possibility of a port for Nintendo Switch. Nakajima-san mentioned that the team has been working on Jump Force for a long time, since before the launch of Nintendo’s console, and they have their hands full with the current platforms already.
We also hear that the artists didn’t necessarily try to adopt a darker visual style, but it was important to underline that Jump’s characters are coming to the real world, which triggered the choice of a palette that felt a bit more realistic.
For instance, there are scenes at night in which characters will have an actual night-time lighting, and the same will go for different times of the day. This makes them look different from the usual anime style.
The slightly more realistic and gritty depiction of violence has been adopted because the characters are superheroes, so the team wanted to showcase what could happen when superheroes fight each other in the real world. They’re so powerful that their blows would, of course, deal real damage, and it would be really weird if their clothes remained pristine during their battles. Over the course of fights clothes and armor get damaged, and the effect of injury is showcased on their bodies.
One of the main challenges of creating this new visual style is in the nature of manga and anime characters themselves. When translating them from 2D to 3D and adding a degree of realism, even just a slight change in lighting can make them look completely different from their established image. That being said, developers didn’t encounter any specific issue with any of the original manga artists disapproving the changes.
The game is set to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Shounen Jump, and it intends to give anime fans something that they haven’t experienced before in terms of visuals in an anime game. The team wants to surprise them by creating something that looks new and different.
At the moment Bandai Namco isn’t envisioning Jump Force as a game like Dragon Ball FighterZ, where players spend a lot of time practicing and improving their skills to get better on the competitive scene. In terms of gameplay, they’re leaning towards the style of Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 or Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 4, which are titles that anyone can enjoy regardless of skill level and even if they’re not specifically into fighting games. According to Nakajima-san there is a lot to enjoy in the world and the story for all kinds of players.
Jump Force will be released for PS4, Xbox One, and PC on February 15th. You can already pre-order your copy on Amazon.
If you want to see more, you can check out the latest reveal including Ryo Saeba from City Hunter and Kenshiro from Fist of the North Star, and the previous trailer starring Seiya and Shiryu from Saint Seiya.