JoJo no Kimyou na Bouken Part 3: Stardust Crusaders 2nd Season

Most of my thoughts are the same, but I think it slightly improves over the first one so Ima just...

Well, let's start with the good.

Great fights and a great team of characters. The fights are what really carries this Part though. This is mostly because there's a lot of them. But that's also because they're just great. Awesome animation that plays in with Jojos unique art style. Since there's so many fights, you also get lots of different perspective and strategies from every character. Which also plays in with how great the characters are. They get heavily explored in many forms throughout the show. The ... characters are all very different and everyone is interesting to some degree.

Now the bad

It's very long, slow paced, and repetitive. The entire part feels the same. It also doesn't advance the plot past the first few episodes. They could've fixed these problems by not making it so long. Shorten the two episode fights to one episode and the show could've been a lot shorter which would've led into better pace and less sameness.

Is it anything awesome? No. But does it have great fights and quite possibly the best ones in the entire series? Yes.

Now, what makes this better than the first half? The last few episodes are the answer to that question. It gives a good amount of emotion to the part and a very compelling story compared to everything before it.

Honestly? This part kind of sucks. I haven't yet watched the next parts, but compared to the first two Stardust Crusaders is a stinker.

Story
Premise: 7/10
A group of people with superpowers go to fight The Bad Guy to save the main character's mother. It's simple, but it works, at least for the most part.

Execution: 5.5/10
The strongest points are the beginning and the ending. The middle feels bloated, what with how many enemy stand users the main characters have to defeat. The first season is worse when it comes to the pacing, every episode introducing a new enemy. Some of them have interesting abilities that you won't ... forget, but most of them are just straight up bad and so forgettable. They feel more like stepping stones and less like actual challenges.

The jokes: 3/10
A lot of the characters in this part are reduced to comedic relief at least a few times. The comedy is cheap and it's hard to even call it comedy. The jokes don't land, instead pulling the characters down, making them act nonsensically just for the sake of a laugh.

Characters: 6/10
Oh god, the characters. From best to worst, I'll put them like this: Kakyoin>Avdol>Jotaro>Joseph>Polnareff>Iggy. At least half of the group behaves so, so inconsistently and illogically.
Kakyoin is the most reasonable and stable character, followed by Avdol, but at Jotaro we start having issues.
He is THE main character, and as a protagonist he's bad. His personality isn't that bad, to be honest, but he's good at everything he does. This 17 yo high schooler defeats adult people who have so much more experience than him with (most of the time) just sheer strength. As the episodes go he gets stronger, and stronger, and stronger without even trying. He's also a master strategist for some reason. He is near perfect in that regard, which just makes you think why even include five other characters in his team when he could basically do everything alone.
Joseph is... there, I guess. He was a great protagonist in part two, and here his character is just boiled down to "old man acting senile".
Iggy. What can I say about Iggy? His characterization boils down to the last three episodes he appears in, before that he's just a bratty dog that can hardly be called part of the team.
Dio is evil for the sake of being evil. There, I said it. I don't like him.

Art: 6.5/10
It's distinct, that's for sure. But if you look closely it's not that great. The stand designs are okay for the most part, and I don't mind the designs of the main cast. But some of these enemy stand users look... questionable.

Sound: 7/10
The first opening is okay, the second one not so much, and the endings are meh. However the voice actors put their whole body into this stupid series, alleviating the score a lot.

This part is dumb, really dumb, and has its fair share of flaws, but it still made me like these characters. Not nearly as much as the first two parts, tho. It's definitely the bottom of the list when it comes to JoJo.

Part three is perhaps the most iconic season of JoJo which despite leaving an undeniable impact on anime as a whole, fails to live up to modern anime standards and suffers from poor pacing and an inconsistent tone.

For what it’s worth, part three starts out fine. The premise is interesting enough and stands are a unique power system that bring a good level of tension and excitement to the fights.

The main issue this series suffers from is the pacing. The series starts out with Jotaro's mom, Holly, being afflicted with a serious, time sensitive, and life-threatening Stand which sets the plot in motion. You ... feel a sense of urgency, Jotaro and Joseph have to save Holly before time runs out. The show even makes a big point to say that she doesn’t have much time. So what does the rest of the show spend its time doing?? If you guessed dilly-dallying in every city between Japan and Egypt without giving hardly a thought to Holly’s problem, you’d be right. It’s really tough to believe that the characters actually care about Holly and her condition with how slow they move and the lack of urgency they have. It seems like they forget about her immediately after starting their journey despite her being the whole reason they set out in the first place. The series turns into a villain of the week style show, which isn’t in itself a bad thing, but it definitely isn’t suited for the central conflict. Most of part three drags on and outside of small amounts of character development here and there - and I mean small, you really don’t get a lot from the middle 40 episodes or so.

Now there are some highlights to this part. Of course, the fight with Dio at the end is very entertaining, and the clear STANDout of the series. Plus the beginning is interesting enough and does a good job of establishing the world, the characters, plus a new power system.

Quite frankly, the Stardust Crusaders would hugely benefit from cutting out most of its episodes. Keep some of the heavier character development episodes in the middle and pick the best villain fights sandwiched between the beginning and the end and you have a pretty solid anime.

However, that is not the show we got. Jojo‘s part three suffers from incredibly sluggish pacing and largely boring villain of the week episodes that betrays the sense of urgency established at the beginning of the series making for a true slog of a show. Trim the fat and you have a good anime. But the peaks are not worth the valleys in the case of JoJos. I recommend watching the first handful of episodes and the last handful of episodes (from the gambler episode on) - do that, and you’ve seen everything you need to from part 3.

First few episodes - 6/10
Middle Chunk of episodes - 2/10
Last several episodes - 7-8/10

Overall - 4/10