JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean S05E03-04 Review: Yare Yare Daze

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Stone Ocean [Season 5], Episodes 3-4: The Visitor, Pt. 1-2

(Mild spoilers for the next couple of episodes for Stone Ocean.)

I do have to admit that my knowledge of Stone Ocean's specific arcs aren't quite as comprehensive as some of the other parts, but I was curious at how this specific plot point with the Whitesnake illusion is going to be handled in the anime. In the manga, it had the misfortune of being the first long multi-Stand fight arc (which is handled a bit differently compared to the previous parts) and also being... well, being almost entirely an illusion. It got so bad that I think the TPB version of Stone Ocean included an entire page explaining the layers-upon-layers of 'genjutsu' happening in these chapters. And I must say that the anime actually does a great job at showcasing this and giving some foreshadowing that something's wrong withot really giving away the fact that it's all a white-goop illusion until the ending sequence of episode 4. Going back to watch (or, like me, having known the story from the manga first) the anime actually drops a fair amount of visual hints that a different ability is taking place, but the audience won't really realize it since the whole thing is set up as merely a simple fight against the next Stand-using minion, the blind sniper Johngalli A.

It's also been a while since I read the manga, but I definitely appreciate how the anime takes a bit more time to showcase Jolyne discovering what Stands are. She gives us a bit of an exposition on the limitations of her string-based powers, and I do like that little opening scene in episode 3 where Jolyne and Gwess ended up dealing with some random extortionist in order to make sure Jolyne doesn't get treated like a bitch. Always liked the bit where Jolyne gives the timid, bullied nameless prisoner an opportunity to rise back up and extort money, but doesn't hold her hand since no one can be that soft in a prison. 

Of course, the whole point of this two-parter is that Jotaro's coming to visit. That, and we get the debuts of two of the most important characters in this Part, although we don't know it just yet. Emporio the Baseball Boy shows up in random trashcans and talks to Jolyne and gives cryptic advice, but he's just... creepy and we're not sure if he's a ghost or not. 

We get the epic Jolyne/Jotaro meeting, of course, and I do really like how they handled it here. I actually took out the manga version of their initial meeting and while they don't rewrite anything too drastically, they did change enough to make the conversation flow better. Stuff like Jotaro explaining the Stand powers a bit more clearly to Jolyne, or the heavier implication that Jotaro's excuse for 'marine biology research' is just superhero codename for Stand-user hunting are already there in the manga, but here it's made a bit more obvious for the audience -- which I guess is necessary to make Jotaro feel distant but not a deadbeat parent. 

While Jolyne doesn't want anything to do with someone she views as an absent parent, Jotaro calmly explains that a Stand-user called Johngalli A. is the one that set up the whole accident with Romeo, the lawyer, and even the victim in order to get Jolyne into the prison. Johngalli is a follower of Dio, and he's trying to get revenge for the Joestar bloodline. 

In the middle of their argumentation, though, Jotaro and Jolyne realize that there are things that're not quite synchronizing -- like the brand of the cigarettes. But they don't have time to process it because Johngalli starts opening fire with his sniper rifle. Stone Free manages to protect Jolyne with a webbed hand, and we get to see Star Platinum - The World in action once more. 

And for a chunk of episodes 3 and 4, all we do is fight Manhattan Transfer -- the flying, drone-like Stand that detects air currents and allows Johngalli A. to have some Daredevil-level senses from half the prison away. It's one of the more convoluted and specific-to-user Stands I can think of, but I can't deny that it's pretty dang cool. Episode 3 ends with the cliffhanger of Jotaro getting shot, while episode 4 spends a good chunk of the fight just showing Jolyne's recklessness and resourcefulness. It's honestly typical anime protagonist stuff, if we're being honest. 

And it's pretty fun stuff -- Johngalli A rants about the factors he needs for aiming while Jolyne uses sprinklers to try and overwhelm Manhattan Transfer's ability to 'read the air'. The huge weird part of the battle is the reappearance of the Baseball Boy, who tells them to escape through a secret passage, but Jolyne instead heads off to hunt down Manhattan Transfer in order to protect the mysterious boy. 

The boiler room fight is pretty standard -- Jolyne ultimately uses a leaking gas pipe to fool Manhattan Transfer's "sight" and crush the enemy Stand. Jotaro then shows up, trusts Jolyne's instinct, and burns Johngalli up by crushing a pipe. But, of course, the whole point is the oddity of what's going on, and the story uses Baseball Boy as the red herring here. At this point in the story we're not sure if he's real or not, since only Jolyne and Manhattan Transfer interacts with him, and Jotaro doesn't seem to notice the boy at all -- explicitly being confused when Jolyne questions him about the boy. At this point we might be thinking that the baseball kid is a ghost or Jolyne's hallucination or something... and then even more inconsistencies like disappearing wounds or corpses switching places happen.  

And then, of course, the big plot twist -- everything in the past episode and a half is a hallucination! The balls on this manga for actually dragging this Manhattan Transfer not-actually-a-fight for so long; it's actually a neat subversion to how these sort of tricks in the manga tend to only last a couple of pages, and tend to be super-duper obvious. The entire fight turns out to be fake, and Jolyne wakes up to see herself, her father and the guard in the meeting room covered with white acidic goo. It's kinda neat, how this turned out to be the actual threat. 

Jolyne figures out which point of her perception is real, and realizes that she only woke up after receiving the gift of the human bone from the mysterious Baseball Cap Boy -- it cut her hand, which causes her to be able to wake up... but episode 4 ends in the cliffhange of Jolyne trying to summon Stone Free but the threads dissolving in the acid. 

Again, it's so fun to see this arc animated and executed so dang well in animation. It's one of the arcs that I feel could've used some editing to tighten up in the manga, and the anime basically fixes a lot of the problems I have which ends up making the illusion reveal something that feels like a huge 'aha, all these weird foreshadowings finally make sense' instead of 'um really'. Of course, this arc isn't quite over yet, but since the episode titles marks episode 3 and 4 as two parts...

Random Notes:

• JoJo fashion/music references! Johngalli A. is named after fashion designer John Galliano; his stand Manhattan Transfer is named after the band of the same name. 
• Using uncanny-valley 3D animation to denote Stands and their effects have been something that the JoJo anime has always done well, but it works exceptionally with the nonhumanoid Manhattan Transfer and its bizarre alien jellyfish drone appearance and how it just spazzes in place to dodge water droplets and stuff. 
• Of course there are some parts of Johngalli's story that doesn't immediately add up -- like why he doesn't just kill Jolyne at any point between the car crash and the prison. We could handwave it as typical supervillain plan overcomplexity, but knowing the main villain of this part, it's likely to be his plan all along. 
• In-between the Stand battles, I appreciate the nods to the prison setting like having Johngalli A smuggle in sniper rifle components through food.
• Speaking of Johngalli A, the long monologue about the principles of sniping, bone structure, meteorology and stuff is the typical "Araki read something very cool and bases a mini-arc around it, and wants to stuff in some of his research notes so he makes his character ramble". It's always present in every part to some degree, but I've always felt like Stone Ocean is the worst (best?) offender.
• Johngalli A's well-endowed behind ends up becoming a bit of a meme in the manga, and the anime really play it up. 
• Jotaro's yare yare daze hits extra hard as a dad having to deal with his rebellious teenage daughter.
• They do remove a fair chunk of the dialogue about Jotaro being a distant dad and husband -- including always saying something terrible to Jolyne every time they met like wanting a divorce. Since the manga itself kind of goes the typical shonen dad trope of Jotaro being a Good Dad(tm) all along, it's neat that they just exorcise these inconsistencies immediately. 
• Insert your own "Star Platinum is starving between parts" and "Jotaro is forty years old?!" jokes.