English Dub Review: Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable “Chili Pepper, Part 1”

GIVE IT AWAY GIVE IT AWAY GIVE IT AWAY NOW

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Josuke is visited in his house by the electrifying Stand, Chili Pepper. He’s apparently been keeping up with what Josuke and his friends have been doing the past few episodes thanks to his abilities to travel through electrical wires. He’s now decided to take on Jotaro, but will first defeat Josuke to make a point. Josuke then pummels him, so he decides to escape for now. Knowing Chili Pepper will be able to find them wherever there’s electricity, Jotaro calls out Okuyasu, Koichi, and Josuke to discuss the situation. There’s also another problem: Joseph Joestar, Josuke’s father and another Stand user, is coming to Morioh to help despite Jotaro’s wishes. His Stand, Hermit Purple, can locate things and people remotely, so it should still be able to find Chili Pepper’s user, even with Joseph’s advanced age.

But because Okuyasu rode over here on a motorcycle, Chili Pepper hid away in the battery and overheard their entire conversation, and ready to kill Joseph the moment he shows up. Luckily for Okuyasu, he’s been chomping at the bit to avenge his brother and uses The Hand to cut off Chili Pepper’s only electricity source for miles. Cornered, Chili Pepper tries tempting Okuyasu to erase him along with the ground, but beneath that ground are buried power lines that he uses to recharge. He cuts off Okuyasu’s arm, then tries finishing him off in the same way as Keicho, by dragging him through the circuits and electrocuting him to death. Thankfully, Josuke is able to use the severed arm to reverse the damage and save him. Chili Pepper gets away, but the goal now is to get to Joseph before him.

OUR TAKE

And we’re back in the plot! Now we finally get to resolving the whole Chili Pepper situation (think I typed that name like nine times in this post), which honestly can’t come a moment too soon. I do like him as a design and the electricity powers are really useful and convenient, but he really would have worked better as a higher level minion of a more commanding or intimidating antagonist. He’s just out to beat Jotaro, who hasn’t exactly been a key player in events lately, so his motivations are pretty boring. He has a major connection to Okuyasu, since they both got their powers from his brother using the Bow and Arrow, but that’s not really touched upon until this episode. Finding him has been the greater goal of the past half a dozen episodes, but everything else that’s been going on has been way more interesting than just trying to find this guy. I can’t really bring myself to care who his user turns out to be since I can’t see him being that interesting enough a character. He just feels like a placeholder until the show’s real bad guy shows up, and knowing that kinda brings the showdown.

But at least this warrants the slowly building return of Part 2 and 3 protagonists, Joseph Joestar. It’s been a decade since this was first published as a manga, but I have to wonder if bringing him back but making him a frail old man was Hirohiko Araki’s way of compromising doing something he was forced to by editorial. Joseph had been such a prominent part of the last two stories that his time in the spotlight was probably meant to be over by now, but people wanted more recognizable faces and so he got to come back again, only now he’s going to be so depowered that they won’t dare ask him back for Part 5 or any future returning characters. Obviously, this didn’t stop those future returns and I’m just wildly speculating, but it makes me think.

That said, we’ve never seen three alive current and former protagonists in one story before and won’t ever again, so I’m eager to see that much. A shame I’m looking forward to that more than the title villain who’s supposed to have been such a threat this whole time, but that’s how things go sometimes. We’re only reaching the end of the first third, so we have plenty of time to improve in terms of bad guys.