JoJo's Bizarre Adventure S03E38 Review: I'm Standing On My Own Two Feet

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable, Episode 38: Crazy Diamond is Unbreakable, Part 2

In the penultimate episode to Diamond is Unbreakable, we get the continuation of the fight between Josuke and Kira, although we start off with a weirdly hilarious sequence where Kira just sort of dicks around with "optimal angles" and wanders around the neighbourhood Josuke hid in, and encounters some random jackass who accuses Kira of being an underwear thief. Completely forgot about this scene, and I found it kind of hilarious. Less hilarious is Josuke's resolution as he accepts Okuyasu's death, and declares that he will take down Kira, right here, right now.

And then Josuke gets attacked by one of the Stray Cat/Killer Queen bubbles that zip in through a crack in the wall of the house he and Hayato are hiding in. While Josuke manages to make the bubble visible with a convenient ashtray, the bubble ends up tracking Josuke. Josuke wonders why this is possible since the bubble shouldn't be an automatic Stand ability like Sheer Heart Attack (which brings to mind the question as to why Kira doesn't use Sheer Heart Attack throughout the entire climax!). Josuke gets injured, but he ends up spotting where Kira is attacking from outside the house.

In a surprising and neat little callback to Josuke learning the ranged debris-flicking skills during the Ratt episode, Josuke launches one such debris towards Kira, and even as Josuke tanks a Killer Queen explosion, we do get a pretty badass "tracking bullet" as Josuke uses Crazy Diamond to 'repair' the blood within the shard of glass and the blood splatter on Kira's jacket, causing the debris to boomerang around and hit Kira in the back.

And honestly, this entire segment as Josuke declares "ONE MORE SHOT!" is just pretty damn glorious.

Josuke ends up realizing that Kira scrambles to get the cellphone that he dropped, causing him to quickly deduce that Kira's getting his own help -- which is the flying polaroid ghost dad, Yoshihiro. Who's just hanging out in Hayato's pocket and calling Kira on another phone. Really, dude, did Yoshihiro forget all about, y'know, the powers of his Stand? I suppose he doesn't have any convenient polaroid cameras lying around.

We actually get a clever scene of Josuke pretending to use a raspy voice to trick Kira into aiming his bubble to chase Yoshihiro, and RIP photograph ghost-dad. Er, I mean, however "real" death works for polaroid ghosts, anyway. It's a bit of an abrupt way to get rid of this recurring villain, but it's a neat way to not just forget about Yoshihiro while also not stealing too much screentime from Kira.

Plus, the giant explosion at the roof that got rid of Yoshihiro finally attracts the attention of Jotaro, Koichi and Rohan from halfway across the town, and Josuke gets a pretty damn badass line telling Kira over the phone that he sent "him straight to hell", just as Kira gets hit by another 'bullet'.

Kira then gets a bit of ramble as he notes how he's always gotten out of trouble by virtue of his ability to improvise as well as some sheer dumb luck, but then Josuke, wounded and all with a piece of bamboo sticking out of his leg, walking up to Kira and declaring in a pretty bombastic way to "BRING OUT KILLER QUEEN!"

It's a pretty damn badass fight, too, with excellent and gorgeous animation. Killer Queen's weakness -- its inability to really stand up in a straight-up fistfight -- is quickly apparent as Kira internal-monologues about how he's going to be defeated right then and there...

And then Stray Cat suddenly instinctively defends itself with little air bubble shields, because it's a territorial cat-plant-thing. It's a pretty badass sequence of animation, too, as Killer Queen flexes while Stray Cat hisses.

Killer Queen then sends out one last bomb -- a bubble-contact bomb -- to murder-kill Josuke... but then it suddenly it moves out of the pathway Kira's laid out for it... because Okuyasu's alive and well!

We never really get a proper reason as to why Okuyasu survived after all the whole "he has no pulse" bit, but I guess he just took a while to come back up? It's not as bad as Avdol's "he's actually alive" moment, in any case. Okuyasu himself gives a bit of a handwave about seeing his brother telling him to stop following people and decide things for himself. It's a bit of a long speech (and Kira just... stands there throughout the entire speech?) and one that's honestly predictable and a bit of a cop-out... but I do like Okuyasu enough and that is admittedly a pretty badass moment as The Hand just causes the floating purple bubble to vanish nowhere.

And then Okuyasu uses The Hand to pull Stray Cat out of Killer Queen's stomach (it's not feral anymore now? I guess Okuyasu is just a cat person), and a beaten Kira is confronted at all sides by the members of the Joestar gang as the others finally show up.

Honestly, though, it's a pretty neat fight. The animation is just straight-up gorgeous, and while the Kira fight is sort of bogged down by Kira himself focusing on specific aspects of his ability, and I can't really decide if the Okuyasu bit is a simple-but-clever moment or a cop-out... it's ultimately definitely a pretty damn satisfying conclusion. The climax isn't quite over yet, though, which is fitting because, again, Kira is the villain with the most buildup out of all of JoJo's villains.