JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders Egypt Arc

Episode 24

"Knock knock, Jotaro!"

"Yare yare, who's there?"

"It's a ROAD ROLLER!"

Well there you go, it finally happened. (Okay, the knock knock joke may be creative license on my part.) To up the stakes for their final confrontation, Dio tries to literally flatten Jotaro by dropping a steamroller on top of him and then punching it with his stand for Maximum Esquishency. For prior fans, it may never be as magical as the first time you saw it, but darned if they don't do the best job they can to make it special. I thought I knew it was coming, but the comic timing of the moment was so perfect that it had me laughing out loud like an idiot anyway. The tension that follows is nothing to sneeze at either, as Jotaro has only a few precious seconds to try and defy gravity itself with Star Platinum's punches.

Through all of this, Dio's VA Takehito Koyasu reaches heretofore unprecedented levels of camp, riding every new line like a carousel pony while his character sits criss-cross applesauce in midair and drives a long-nailed finger into his own head before deliriously lapping up the blood that spews everywhere. (Also, he goes "WRYYYYYYY!" again for the first time since Part III started.) This is the wild and childlike Dio that viewers from the beginning of the Jojo's saga have been dying to see return, so it's fun to see this unabashedly silly older personality pop back up once Dio gets a taste of more Joestar blood. He says that sucking Grandpa Joseph dry is nothing but a necessary step on his way to becoming ruler of the world, but he just can't hide his enthusiasm. Taking out another Joestar pushes Dio over into gleeful elation so hard that he starts celebrating before he's even won...which leads to his downfall, of course.

The show makes it very clear that Jotaro would have lost if his nemesis hadn't decided to gloat so hard about defeating two out of three Joestars on his list. (66% is still a D, Mr. Brando. No, I don't mean D for Dio.) With Jonathan's body and Joseph's blood in his possession, Dio's vampire-head is so high in the sky that he thinks driving Jotaro to despair is a better plan than just finishing him quickly. He shows off by stopping time for a full eleven seconds as opposed to his usual five, and that's where Jotaro has him pegged. After he's positive that Jojo has been squashed with the steamroller, Dio decides to give himself a pat on the back, only to realize that he can't even twitch a finger in his own stopped time-dimension. That's because it's not his stopped time; it's Jotaro's. The World and Star Platinum are the same type of stand after all, and while Dio was crowing about victory, Jotaro was working overtime to figure out his own time-stopping abilities. He may only have a couple seconds compared to Dio, but unlike Dio, he makes it count. After a couple righteous putdowns, Jotaro leaves Dio's body nothing but a pile of meat, ready to Be Factory-sealed for freshness and laid out to spoil into dust when the sun rises.

It's an incredibly cathartic victory for Jotaro, but his triumph isn't over yet. After doctors tell him that it's useless to try and bring his grandpa back from the dead, Jotaro retorts that he's tired of hearing that things are "useless." ("Muda" in this case, aka Dio's crushing battle cry that he threw alongside every punch.) Grandpa Jojo isn't quite brain dead yet, since it's only been several minutes since Dio sucked him dry. Jotaro transfuses the blood from Dio's diced-up body back into Joseph, uses Star Platinum to start his heart back up, and a miracle occurs! (Okay, first Grandpa Jojo takes advantage of the bizarre situation to pretend to be Dio, which forces him to un-traumatize his grandson through a series of 80's trivia questions. Joke's on you, Foxy Grandpa!)

Nevertheless, half of the Stardust Crusaders can now return home, after wishing well to their fallen comrades in the great beyond. Polnareff returns to France, the Joestars return to Japan, and they pledge to remain friends forever. It's as satisfying a victory as could be expected from the 50 days of insurmountable odds that they faced between Japan and Egypt. In fact, barring minute pacing and animation issues, this was as satisfying an adaptation as fans could have hoped for, in its tone-perfect humor and heart. (This final episode also featured a sound-effect packed version of the OP theme, while retaining the Dio duel bonus animation from last week.)

It's anyone's guess as to when or even if an adaptation of Part 4, "Diamond is Unbreakable," will appear in anime form, but Part 3 was an incredible ride of violent camp and sincere insanity that I look forward to revisiting for a good time on lazy weekends in the future. It may be difficult to write about (and I don't think I'll be the one to write about Part 4 if it's covered in the future), but it's been a joy to experience, and I hope this will be an anime that sticks around and remains fun to share with casual genre fans and hardcore otaku alike for many years to come. Thanks for the journey, Stardust Crusaders! Enjoy that last train home...

Rating: A+

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders Egypt Arc is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Hope has been an anime fan since childhood, and likes to chat about cartoons, pop culture, and visual novel dev on Twitter.