JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Season 1, Episode 23: Warrior of Wind
Half of this episode involves the final battle between Joseph and Wamuu, and Wamuu's eventual death. And god, it's a pretty damn awesome final battle, with the Pillar Men theme blasting at full volume accompanied with the great sound effects they made for Wamuu's Holy Sandstorm attacks. His "FAINARU MODO!" to create this gigantic whip of wind is amazingly animated. Perhaps less amazing is how Joseph manages to actually beat Wamuu, which... makes sense, I guess? He throws in a bottle of alcohol he pulls out of his ass, gets Wamuu to slice it, and then throws Caesar's hamon-conducting bandana and fire into the mix, causing Wamuu's wind-pipes to suck all of it in and blow Wamuu up from the inside.
Some neat, well-done voice acting from Wamuu and Joseph, though, and while I'm not the biggest fan of how their fight ended especially after the intensity of the chariot battle in the previous episode, it's still a good death. Once you get over the silliness that Wamuu's head was able to talk for a full ten minutes before finally dissolving (Pillar Men anatomy, how do they work?) there's an awesome manly recognition between Joseph and Wamuu. There was no way in hell Joseph was going to let Wamuu live, especially not considering Wamuu killed Caesar... but Joseph does respect Wamuu as a warrior, easing his pain with his own blood not out of pity, but out of respect.
Wamuu's final act is in honour of his opponent, jumping up (as a head!) to shishkebab a couple of vampire mooks that try to sucker-punch Jojo, before finally disintegrating. Manly as hell, yeah?
And then we cut away to Lisa Lisa versus Kars, who gives a brief eulogy about Wamuu. But while it's evident that Kars respects Wamuu (there was no 'he was a fool with honour, and he deserved his death!' style of thing that shonen villains are wont to do) he does not share in any of Wamuu's values. There's the weird question why he doesn't just kill Lisa Lisa right away with the army of vampires, but I guess he likes the sport?
Kars tricks Lisa Lisa into attacking a body double, before stabbing him from behind, and really this is probably something that makes Kars and Joseph somewhat similar to each other. They both cheat in battle. Of course, Kars is a lot more savage about it, disrespecting the rules of combat and using a second person in a battle, but is it really that different? I've always found Kars and Joseph's similarities in regards to combat rather interesting.
And then as the vampire army descends upon Joseph... the cavalry arrives! With an amazing reprise of the Sekai Ichi theme, von Stroheim arrives with an army of ultraviolet cannons. Oh, and Speedwagon and (sigh) Smokey are there too. Joseph faces off against Kars, who's about to kill Lisa Lisa... and then Smokey and Speedwagon drop the random bomb that Lisa Lisa is actually not Joseph's adopted aunt, but her biological mother. Which... which is a revelation that makes some sort of sense, but at the same time so much of the final battle against Kars will cut back and forth and revolve around the drama that Lisa Lisa is Joseph's mother, and I actually dread that part of the finale.
Oh well. My next review will go through all three of the final episodes in one big mega-review, mostly becuase episodes 24 and 25 are so tied to each other, and the 26th is just a brief epilogue.
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