JoJo's Bizarre Adventure S03E28-29 Review: The Ethics Of Beating Up An Injured Man

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable, Episodes 28-29: Highway Star, Pts. 1-2

After the events of the whole "I Am An Alien" arc (which takes up the first half of episode 28, although a To Be Continued cutoff point makes it clear that the studio considers the two halves of the episode to be separate) we start off with Rohan and Josuke... still being kind of awkward. The two haven't really interacted all that much outside of that arc, but now it's clear that Rohan and Josuke pretty much ends up despising each other. Or, well, Rohan certainly does.

And this episode initially seems to be set up to be a "two protagonists that don't get along well have to work together" bit, although that doesn't really end up coming into place. Granted, Josuke is being kind of a dick by completely ignoring Rohan's clearly panicked reaction of seeing a room manifesting on the side of a tunnel. Dude, you live in a world of Stands. The hell, Josuke?

The first sequence of this little arc starts off with Rohan doing his own personal investigation with his pretty badass bike, finding a real door  leading into a room... and then he hears footsteps. Rohan zips away on his bike, and he realizes that the room is apparently part of a Stand trap, and a pretty weirdly elaborate one, at that! Upon entering the room, Rohan is pursued by Highway Star, a Stand that manifests in... a bunch of ghostly footprints that just run after Rohan, a visual that I loved in the manga and the anime translates perfectly.

The footprints apparently have a top speed of 60 km/h, and Heaven's Door can't affect it fast enough before the little footprints dig themselves into Rohan's body and starts draining his... "fluids" or some shit. Great usage of the visualization of Highway Star digging into Rohan's skeleton, too.

And then as Rohan crashes, Highway Star's little footprints start stacking themselves on each other to form the true body of the Stand, and I genuinely think that this is a pretty damn cool design feature -- honestly, other than Killer Queen himself, Highway Star might very well be my favourite Stand-of-the-week in Part IV.

Rohan gets dragged back into the room, and Highway Star tells Rohan to call for help and trap Josuke in the room, to which Rohan responds with a hammy "BUT I REFUSE!" (daga kotowaru!), a line that ends up being sort of his catchphrase in the fandom, because Rohan has enough pride to tell self-assured people one big "no", and tells Josuke to run out of the trap. Josuke, of course, enters the room to save Rohan anyway, but Rohan then uses Heaven's Door to insert a line that says "Josuke will be launched back, specifically,  at 70 km/h".

Rohan himself is presumed near-death throughout the episode, although apparently Jotaro went and helped Rohan out prior to the final scene of this episode.

And then we get to the second part of the episode, and my favourite part of the whole Highway Star fight! As much as I do like Part IV, Josuke is a bit marginalized, having to compete for screentime with a previous and a pretty popular main character, Jotaro, as well as his buddy Koichi, who probably takes as much screentime as Josuke himself. As well as a villain that actually takes up a fair chunk of screentime in Kira. And it's been some time since we saw some real badassery on the part of Josuke, as he repairs the bike and has to zoom around at exactly 60 km/h and not slowing down even a little bit to avoid Highway Star. There's this amazingly animated sequence as Josuke breaks apart the motorbike to avoid a baby carriage crossing the street, then repairs and reforms it without losing momentum. That is badass.

Josuke then goes on a bit of a deliquent charge as he steals phones to try and contact Koichi (of course the people he steals phones from are waiting for super-important, life-changing calls) to investigate someone in critical condition, as well as having a connection to an injury near that tunnel, managing to put two and two together from Rohan's words and from other clues. And in a pretty neat incorporation of the "Morioh-cho Radio" segments into the anime (none of the radio segments are in the original manga), the fact that there was an accident near the tunnel is actually foreshadowed earlier in episode 28!

The rest of the episode is just the high-speed chase, and while the segment with Josuke breaking a car to steal gasoline and zip it into his motorbike did take a bit too long, we do get the interesting detail that apparently Highway Star's little foot-forms actually have powerful smelling abilities, able to track down Josuke by scent -- but at the same time, is clearly moving on autopilot, similar to Sheer Heart Attack. Even when formed into its humanoid form, Highway Star acts more like an animal, swaying from side to side and following its nose.

Meanwhile... in another hilariously memorable scene, Koichi investigates a hospital to track down Fungami Yuya, who's hospitalized after a motorbiking accident in the tunnel, and when met with a bitch of a nurse who makes fun of Koichi's height... we get the most hilarious bit of English swearing from Echoes Act 3 -- "OKAY, MASTAH! LET's KILL DA HO! BEEEEEETCH!". GLORIOUS.

Of course, Echoes doesn't actually kill said ho, but manages to get her to spill information that allows Koichi to direct Josuke into the hospital, and as Josuke quite literally crashes into the hospital, we get Koichi using Act 3 Freeze to help delay Highway Star enough for Josuke to ascend the elevator, finding Yuya... who's wrapped up from head to toe in bandages, and surrounded by three ladies. Yuya apparently has some superhuman smelling abilities himself, and just mocks Josuke as he arrives into the room a bit too late as Highway Star starts draining his fluids.

The setup to Josuke's recovery is a bit silly, though, with Yuya going on and on about how he smells adrenaline (how?) in the air and that someone's pissed off in the room, and then Josuke apparently... replenishes his fluids by drinking Yuya's IV fluid? That's insanely unsanitary, and also, neither adrenaline nor IV fluids work like that!


Still, I'm willing to overlook that one bit of oddity because the next scene is so darkly hilarious. Josuke uses Crazy Diamond to break Yuya's good leg, and gives this pretty badass speech about how Crazy Diamond's punches are definitely a lot faster than a mere 60 km/h. Yuya's attempt of "you wouldn't hit a cripple, would you?" ended up being nullified when Josuke fixes Yuya to full health...  and then unleashes a DORARARARARARA barrage on the now-healthy Yuya, punching him so hard he gets thrown out of the hospital. Quite badass!

Overall, despite some rather odd bits (the IV fluid segment, mostly), Highway Star is easily one of my favourite fights in part IV, due to the amazingly intense fight and Highway Star having that right mix of having conditions that are just complex enough to be more than just a simple power of "controls X element" without going into the bizarrely super-specific and overcomplicated messes some Stands will be in the future. Great set of episodes. 

The JoJo Playlist

• Highway Star is named after the pretty appropriate Deep Purple song Highway Star, itself a very high-paced mostly-instrumental song that actually does fit the Stand thematically well.