English Dub Review: Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable “Highway Go Go, Part 2”

The Feet and the Furious AKA Surprisingly not as weird as “Game Set Machu Picchu”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Josuke continues his race against both the speedy feet of Highway Go Go and against the slowly decreasing time Rohan has to live. This requires a lot of quick-time-event thinking on his part as he navigates the city looking for the Stand’s user. With Koichi’s help, he finds out the user is getting nutrients to work off an injury while staying in a hospital. But it wouldn’t be fair to beat up someone who’s injured, so Josuke heals his injuries…right before beating him senseless again and forcing him to never use Highway Go Go again. Josuke saves Rohan, but they still don’t get along.

Also, Shinobu finds a cat.

OUR TAKE

This has probably happened before, but I have to say I’m not doing this episode justice just through a plot summary. A high speed chase from a collection of life-sucking feet while breaking and repairing obstacles is the kind of craziness that I’ve come to know and love from this series, just like “Baby Freddy Krueger” and “playing video games to bet souls going into puppets”. But besides that, the real highlights of weird comedy come from the dub trying to incorporate Engrish into its dialogue, like Reverb Act 3’s “LET’S KILL DAH HOE BEEEEEEEETCH” and things like that. Basically, if you want a sample of the “low” setting of weird Jojo antics, this episode is where you go.

Also of note that I’m not sure the story was aware of (since they don’t make any mention of it) is the odd duality going on between Josuke’s Shining Diamond and Highway Go Go. The most obvious difference would be their powers, where Shining Diamond can only heal others while Highway Go Go can only heal its own user at the cost of others, meaning one can only give while the other can only take. But their users are also total opposites, with Josuke being a crafty but ultimately well meaning guy (most of the time) and for what little we see of him, Highway Go Go’s user is a smooth talker who is just a douchebag deep down. I don’t think I’d WANT much to come of this, but it did seem interesting how this was almost the makings of a foil for Josuke that was reduced to a (hopefully) one-and-done bad guy of the week.

Yet even with all the quirky bits of this episode, I’m still finding the same issue as I’ve had with the last few. That being that this seems far too lax for the bigger situation at hand of finding Kira. It would be one thing if these users were hired by Yoshihiro to find and kill Josuke’s group specifically, but so far they just seem to be random dudes that the guys just stumble upon and dick around with for an episode or two when they should be focusing on the goddamn serial killer loose in their town! And I realize that would be basically turning things into Part 3 again, and that some people didn’t really like the monster of the week aspect of that season, but things as they are feel like everyone’s mind just checked out for the next handful of episodes, which is seriously killing the buzz I was having around the time Kira first showed up. Though it looks like we might be getting an episode just about Kira again next week.

Now, I’m gonna go and look into this weird-ass April Fools broadcast Adult Swim is pulling. Looks pretty freaky deeky.