JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Vento Aureo S04E28 Review: In the Court of the Crimson King

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Golden Wind, Season 4, Episode 28: Beneath a Sky on the Verge of Falling

So after the Risotto/Doppio fight in the previous episode, we get a lot more Team Bucciarati, as they declare victory against Risotto, and Bucciarati quickly tells Abbacchio to replay the footage of Trish's mother, sensing that something isn't quite right, because, hey, there's no telling what sort of weird shit Stand users can use. Unfortunately, due to the length of time that it'll take to fully replay a memory that's so long ago, Abbacchio will take 8-10 minutes to properly get a replay of the scene they need and uncover the Boss's true identity.

Meanwhile, Risotto and Doppio are having an... interesting conversation. Doppio transforms into the Boss at last, and demands that Risotto give back the iron he stole, noting that "you'd die in embarrassment here otherwise". Which... which honestly, is kind of a stupid thing to ask from Risotto. Clearly none of these gangster dudes are the honourable romantic type, and Risotto refuses to assist the Boss at all. Risotto ends up using the splattered blood and the Metallica within to actually turn Aerosmith around to shoot the Boss... except, of course, with King Crimson's ability, the Boss "blew away 0.5 seconds of time", and causes all the bullets to phase through King Crimson and hit Risotto to death.

And it's interesting that thanks to this battle, the Boss ends up being in a bit of a pickle since he's out of blood and is struggling to move. He manages to get away before Bucciarati and Narancia arrive onto the cliff to investigate the body, but while they only find the single body, they figure out that it's very, very strange that the detached foot was sliced off, not shot off. Narancia's attempt to increase the radar's sensitivity is also met with a lot of interference from tourists and animals.

And it's a fun, tense scene as Team Bucciarati is hunting down the wounded Boss, while the Boss is trying to take out the priority target in this case, which is Abbacchio. And I am a huge, huge fan of how this situation happens from a clash of two villainous factions. A particularly fun bit is the tense scene when Narancia and Bucciarati seems to have cornered the Boss behind a rock, and Bucciarati using Sticky Fingers ends up finding a poor kid who's lost a lot of blood, and his mouth has been sewn shut with sneaker laces, being used as a decoy.

I feel like it's a bit of an ass-pull that the Boss seems to 'drain' blood from the kid, even though none of his abilities revolve around that, though. And actually 'drinking' the blood doesn't really work that way.  It's a little black mark in what's otherwise a tense sequence.

But as Abbacchio goes through his replay and encounters a bunch of random kids playing ball nearby, he gets punched straight through the gut by the Boss's King Crimson, having disguised himself as one of the children. Abbacchio has a fucking hole in his chest and just straight-up dies, and Moody Blues cracks apart and fades away into dust. It's a pretty surprising and sudden death, and one that's honestly relatively well done -- it is perhaps a bit too telegraphed, with how the Boss keeps noting about how Abbacchio is the biggest deterrent to his plans, but it's still a decent enough death that shows that the Boss isn't exactly messing about. It's a neat break, after the previous fight is essentially the Boss nearly very damn well getting his ass killed because Doppio decides to take matters into his own hands. We also get a neat little sendoff for Abbacchio, as he goes into this gray-scale purgatory and meets that one officer that was relevant in his backstory, talking about truth, results, and how Abbacchio has enough of a steel will to 'see things through to the end', and he's already on the 'last stop'. It's a neat little scene.

Meanwhile, in the real world, everyone else finds Abbacchio's dead body, and they're horrified. The more childish Narancia's in full denial, demanding that Giorno resurrect Abbacchio, while everyone else's just baffled how the paranoid Abbacchio could let someone get so close. And as they mourn the death of their comrade, turns out that, yes, Abbacchio's will extends to his final act. It's not like Shigechi from Part IV that died mostly for drama, Abbacchio's death, in his final seconds, has been him transforming Moody Blues into the face of the Boss's true visage, and pressed the face to mould it into the stone pillar, meaning that even in death, Abbacchio still manages to give one last figurative middle finger to the Boss. Abbacchio as the more serious and senior member of the group being the one to die is also pretty neat -- I've always find him the least interesting out of the five main cast members (Fugo aside, of course) but the pacing of his backstory in the anime has certainly improved how I perceive him by a fair bit.

Ultimately, it's a tense, well-paced episode, even if it does take a bunch of logic leaps and a bunch of "the powers work like this because, um, we kind of need it to". Honestly, that's my biggest problem with King Crimson as a whole, where even moreso than any other JoJo Stand, its powers seem to vary from encounter to encounter. Still, I'm ultimately a fan of this one, and while Abbacchio's death is partially done for shock value, it's also a neat little development in the story. Coming off of the mostly-everyone-is-safe Part IV, it's nice to build up a stronger core cast (compared to the relatively one-dimensional casts of Part II and III) and actually make it mean something that a member of the group dies. Mostly this episode's great thanks to the follow-up to the Doppio/Risotto scene. We're basically in the endgame of Vento Aureo at this point, with only four main characters left, and the final arc of them hunting the boss beginning in the next episode.