It was in October of 1987, almost a full year into Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, that Araki decided to do something that a lot of people would probably consider drastic, specially in a weekly manga like this one. He completely changed the setting and the cast of characters of his work and made us travel almost 30 years into the future to meet a whole new generation of Jojo. It's with the introduction of a much more rebellious main character, a one Joseph Joestar, that Jojo's Bizarre Adventure Part 2 starts, also known as Battle Tendency.

With that said, Battle Tendency feels like a natural sequel to Phantom Blood, which is not something we can say about every single part of this series. The fact that it follows the story of the first one and expands on it, really helps. It makes these two parts feel like an era of Jojo on it's own. It drags the Castlevaniesque feel with it, still following the mask's story and exploring it's origin, and having the vampires and ripple. All things that are about to be discarded after this part.

Now, this review is a bit of a follow up to my review of part one. If you didn't read that, I talked about a lot of problems that Phantom Blood had that stopped me from enjoying it as much as I wanted to. Part two really doesn't improve much on most of these aspects. The art is still very much the same as it was a year prior, and all I said still remains true. The designs are nice, they're unique, they're colorful when given the chance, whenever you see a character from Jojo, you know you're seeing a Jojo character. But it's still ugly in here and the poses are still not only ridiculous but feel unnatural. The dialogues too still remain very "clunky" and unnatural, which I swear to God, feels like a lot of mangaka and comic writers from this era don't know how to have dialogues with people, because isn't certainly just a Jojo problem and it really ruins a lot of the immersion.

So it seems like I'm about to stick another 55/100, pack things and go home, but there's one thing that I said in my Phantom Blood review that is very true here. I said that the other problems could be excused if we had a better character. Since the main character was boring, his dialogues unnatural and his artstyle ugly... there really wasn't much to enjoy. Thankfully, in Battle Tendencies we have Joseph.

Joseph is way more charismatic than any character in the previous part and he alone makes this one be so much more enjoyable. He's fun to follow, but the great thing about Part 2 is that it's not just him, every single character is a step above the previous cast. His rival and friend Zeppeli makes for interesting and fun interactions. Stroheim is probably the only Nazi people would support, because his passion is amazing, which I guess passion is not something we want Nazis to have... uh... you know what? Lets just skip that boy. The villains here are also much more interesting than Dio. They aren't just evil, they have respect for their opponents, which is interestingly a contrast to Joseph, who despite being the good guy, is more prone to throw a cheap shot in the name of good, than our villains are in the name of evil. And never forget Lisa Lisa, which is considered one of the pioneers of strong women in shonen manga!

I still think that Battle Tendencies has a good amount of flaws and problems that stop me from naming it anywhere close to a favourite of mine, but I think that it's a good example of how one detail can make something infinitely better. The cast on this one is the MVP of the entire manga and it very much carries it and makes it an enjoyable experience from start to end!