JoJo's Bizarre Adventure S01E11 Review: Grenade vs Space Ripper Stingy Eyes

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Season 1, Episode 11: The Game Master

[Revised 10/2018]

The entirety of this episode is devoted to the fight between Joseph and Straizo, and unlike Dio from the previous Part, it's clear that Straizo is merely the "starter villain" of sorts. He's someone whose power the audience has sort of a gauge for -- as a vampire, he's roughly equivalent or a little weaker compared to Dio from the previous Part. But Joseph, instead of using the same Hamon tricks to beat him like Jonathan did, instead goes for... different sort of tactics. It shows how utterly batshit crazy Joseph is in picking his tactics to fight an undead monster, and while the rest of the series is actually going to subvert this, it's a neat way of an effective usage of the power scale escalation trope so common in manga.

Part 2 is also perhaps where the series has the highest concentration of JoJo poses, with both Joseph and Straizo pulling off some hilariously amazing poses as they monologue with each other. Special kudos go to Straizo flexing to push out the tommy gun bullets embedded in his body. Yeah, we kinda saw it in Phantom Blood with Jack the Ripper, but it's no less badass.

Joseph is also a barrel of laughs, and in-between his insane improvisations, he spouts off some of the most hilariously wacky lines ("Get out of here, or I'll french kiss you!" and the ever-quotable "Now you're going to say [X]!") and delivering some hilarious EHHHH reactions. The actual fight ends up being pretty mundane for JoJo standards, but it's still a fun fight to watch -- especially how at one point Joseph calmly talks about how he's going to do his 'master plan' in all seriousness... before running the fuck away, like a bat out of hell. (Click here, it's amazing). Another star moment is Joseph somehow entangling like a dozen hand grenades to Straizo's hair.

There is a rather weak segment of the fight that honestly felt a bit out of place -- that's the mirror bit. Yes, Straizo might be fooled with interacting with the mirror after he got up from being shot, but for that long? Seriously? How poor is his eyesight? Maybe that's a side-effect of his Space Ripper Stingy Eyes (Supeshu ripaaah sutingi aizuuu) which, bless the animation studio,  Straizo actually does get to say.  It almost makes up for when Dio doesn't say it in Part 1.

The climax of the battle happens on a bridge, with the contrast between Jonathan and Joseph being pretty well-demonstrated when Straizo takes a random lady hostage, with Joseph noting how utterly pointless taking a hostage that he doesn't know is. Yes, Joseph does get angry when Straizo starts ripping teeth out (so much that he flexes his muscles and bursts through three layers of clothes) and he's definitely a good guy at heart, but he's certainly no Jonathan.

Also a neat foreshadowing is the "beetle scarf" that Straizo wears that is able to dissipate Hamon to the surroundings. One thing that the far-more-popular Parts 3 through 6 never really got right is actually having the entire Part feel like a cohesive story with foreshadowing and stuff, which Parts 1 and 2,  due to their shorter length, excels at..

Anyway, Straizo gets killed by Joseph bouncing back the Space Ripper Stingy Eyes with some hamon-charged shot glasses, and I really do like Joseph's wacky improvisations with his hamon abilities. "Apologize to Speedwagon in hell!"

The episode's last five minutes introduces one of the more bombastic characters from Battle Tendency, and quickly establishes that this is World War II. The more overt Nazi symbols and insignias are removed from the anime, but it's pretty clear that Major Rudol von Stroheim, set up to be the next antagonist, is a member of the SS. The way he's introduced is pretty wacky, too,  basically with a huge "look at him, he is an evil Nazi soldier man that everyone is afraid of!" sign over his head, and he wants to utilize the mysterious stone mask for his own purposes.

Oh, and somehow, Stroheim has Speedwagon fixed up after that whole encounter with Straizo. The justification and explanation for this is a very simple "German medicine is the GREATEST IN THE WORLD!" (or sekai ichiiii if you want to quote him) Oh, I love Stroheim's hamminess. We also get thrown in that Stroheim isn't that evil, he's... he's pragmatic, I guess? He does plan to kill a cell full of prisoners to feed their blood to the stone mask's "pillar man", but instead tells them to "choose one man to die", and spares the altruistic child that volunteers.

Overall, it's a neat ending to the relatively short Straizo storyline, and it definitely builds up Stroheim as an interesting character for the upcoming conflict against the clear antagonists -- the mysterious Pillar Man.


The JoJo Playlist:

• The for the Battle Tendency part is BLOODY STREAM, which is a pretty bloody fantastic energetic song.  I'm not sure if I like it better than Sono Chi no Sadame, but it's a pretty good opening nonetheless.
• Rudol von Stroheim borrows his name from Austrian-American actor Erich von Stroheim, with his film adaptation of Frank Norris' McTeague, titled Greed, apparently one of the most influential movies ever made.