JoJo's Bizarre Adventure S03E16 Review: Quest - Slay Two Rats

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable, Episode 16: Let's Go Hunting

A pretty standalone episode, this time featuring Jotaro and Josuke together -- not often that two JoJo's end up working together on a single episode, huh? There's definitely a mentor/student vibe to the two of them, with Jotaro basically teaching the far more gung-ho Josuke how to hunt prey. The contrast between the intense and all-business Jotaro and the far more light-hearted Josuke is definitely clear here, especially during the sequences they had fighting the two rats that share the Stand Ratt. Or two rats that happen to manifest the exact same Stand. It's not made explicitly clear.

But apparently Otoishi dicked around with the bow and arrow, and instead of shooting people with it like Keicho did, he shot rats. Yep! The concept of the episode, which is Jotaro and Josuke using ball bearings to aid them in shooting the fast-moving rats, is emphasized a lot and made out to be the literal only way to take out the rats, which was always something I found bizarre. Wasn't Star Platinum the fastest, most precise Stand? Didn't they have access to Okuyasu's The Hand, which can straight-up negate distances? It feels like an enforced bit of handicap, honestly, and the fact that somehow Jotaro's usage of The World ends up only managing to buy a brief bit of time from Ratt always felt a bit odd to me. Yes, Jotaro's skills have deteriorated somewhat and his powers of The World has never been as powerful as Dio's, but still...

I found it utterly interesting, by the way, that this episode came right after the episode where Kishibe Rohan notes how much he loves to look up random trivial facts to incorporate it into his manga and make it more realistic, with segments of this episode lovingly dedicated to giving random facts about rats (brown rats can swim, can eat anything, can weigh 1 kg, adults can reach 20-30 cm and can jump 2 meters) and the whole concept of "backtracking", something that bears, weasels and rabbits do to evade hunters. Definitely a fun bit for me. Real rats probably don't have whatever that growth the head that these two rats have, though.

Jotaro and Josuke's rat hunt ends up reaching a farm where they found the farmers reduced to clumps of still-living flesh fused together as part of the rat's Stand, which is a steampunk tank-cannon that shoots darts that dissolve anything it touches (even Stands) to lumps of melted flesh (they got better, thanks to Crazy Diamond). Josuke manages to kill the first rat, but Jotaro has apparently fought a second one, which was the plot twist here -- there are two rats.

"Bug-Eaten", as Jotaro dubs the second rat that takes up the second half of the episode, ends up being a shrewd hunter that ends up fooling Josuke and Jotaro into following it into a fair bit of distance before backtracking its own tracks, and setting up a sniping position somewhere. It's definitely a tense segment once you get past the fact that a rat with a sniper cannon can somehow manage to bypass the combined powers of Star Platinum and The World...  but it does give Josuke a pretty badass bit as he launches rifle bullets and gets his shit together and becomes stone-cold calm in order to get Bug-Eaten out of the rock he's hiding behind.

Overall, despite my complaints, it's still a pretty fun episode overall.

The JoJo Playlist:

• Ratt is named after the 80's heavy metal band Ratt, best known for their hit singles Round and Round and Lay It Down.