JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable

Episode 29

In a fantasy action series, chances are that some conflicts are going to be relatable while others will be less so. I think borrowing a motorcycle to outrun a team of disembodied feet that chase you by your sense of smell falls under the latter category.

Last week, I kind of glossed over the newly introduced Stand in my review. Our new enemy is Yuya Fungami, an immobilized, hospitalized man with a trio of female groupies looking after him. Why these woman like this guy so much isn't really made clear. He seems like kind of a butt. Fungami's Stand, Highway Star, has possibly the most random assortment of abilities I've seen in this show yet. It can create imaginary rooms to trap people, it can absorb the vitality out of people and give the stolen energy to its user, and it can separate into lots of feet that all have an impeccable sense of smell.

Smelly feet aside, this episode ends up being quite the ride. We've got Josuke on a motorcycle, trying to outrun the feet and their 60 kmph speed limit, and once he's maneuvering around town, he has to get creative about how he keeps up his speed without crashing and burning. In several instances, we see him having to use Crazy Diamond to destroy something that would be in his way and then reconstruct it as soon as he passes. The craziest of these comes when he has to blow up his own bike in just the right fashion to avoid a mother and her baby, then rebuild the bike once the momentum has flung himself and all the pieces safely over. This is the kind of stuff Crazy Diamond was designed for.

The other portion of this episode takes place in Morioh's hospital where Fungami waits, and this is by far the funniest material. Fungami is very impressed by the new sense of smell that he's been granted since the arrow pricked him (picking up on the fact that one of his groupies is on her period, because this show hasn't been crass enough for a while). I laughed for a solid minute when he insisted that someone in the room smelled “angry” and he couldn't figure out who it was, while a drained and beaten Josuke loomed from off-camera. It has such an “Oh, he's right behind me, isn't he?” quality to it that feels so perfectly absurd. Also, continuing the fun ‘broken/not broken’ Crazy Diamond shenanigans, Josuke finds the perfect way around the guilt of beating up a hospitalized man by fixing him first before kicking his ass on repeat.

Between the motorcycle stuff and the hospital stuff, both the action and the comedy in this episode were on point. There was also some weird stuff going on with Koichi trying to track Fungami down and getting sassed by the woman working the desk. Like a lot of powers in this show, I'm still not really sure how Echoes Act Three is supposed to work, but I suppose I'll go along with it for now. From what I understand, more Kira stuff is coming up, so hopefully that means we'll learn more about his new family, since that's the stuff I find the most interesting right now.

Rating: B+

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Sam Leach writes and records about One Piece for The One Piece Podcast and you can find him on Twitter @LuckyChainsaw