English Dub Review: Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable “Yukako Yamagishi Falls in Love, Part 2”

Feel No Pain…is also a single on Love Deluxe. Hope these music puns are working!

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Koichi’s captivity is only getting worse, as Yukako won’t even let him go to the bathroom unless he answers history questions. Josuke and Okuyasu finally figure out he’s been taken, but have no luck in finding out where he might be. Thinking fast, Koichi uses Reverb to find a payphone he can use to call them, but Yukako thinks of this too and goes to disconnect it. Reverb’s powers make use of this to dial Josuke’s number, and the background noise of the waves gives Josuke a hint that Koichi is still in town, just near a beach, and he deduces the location from there.

Unfortunately, this also confirms to Yukako that Koichi has powers like her, but she actually seems kinda happy about this at first. At least until Koichi barricades the door and screams how much he hates her. While he hopes to get her to understand how much he’ll never want to date her, she ignores this and begins pushing through the blockage. Now she issues an ultimatum: love her or die, and then she’ll be able to remember him as being in love her even if he never did in life. Koichi tries using Reverb to defend himself, only to find it collapsed in its shell, seemingly dead.

With no defense, he can only sit and wait in fear as Yukako slowly tears through his barricade. When all hope is lost, Reverb reappears in a new form, Reverb Act 2, with the new ability to make its sound writing cause physical effects like pushing Yukako out with a gust of wind. He takes this opportunity to cut out Yukako’s hair and take on a Polnareff-like hairstyle and begin his counter-attack. Their fight takes them to the edge of a cliff, which Yukako falls off as it crumbles, but Koichi manages to make a spiky rock below into a bounce pad so she can avoid certain death. She finally relents and Koichi is finally able to escape and meet up with his friends, though now Yukako’s love is even stronger. Also, Morioh has a new landmark!

OUR TAKE

For a rather plain premise, they sure managed to turn this into a pretty intense fight towards the end. Yukako really isn’t anything special as a stalker with a crush character, though I guess this story having been written in the early 90’s excuses that somewhat. Her escalating obsessive caretaking behavior kinda reached its peak at the end of the last episode, so it was really only a matter of time before she switched gears to murderous rampage mode. The problem with that, at least as she is right now, is that she becomes a broken record on how much she should be loved by Koichi and has done everything for him and so on. It’s not THAT big a problem since this is really only the first enemy that felt lacking in personality AND powers, but I gotta point it out when I see it. Plus, Yukako still being alive and fully capable of using her Stand probably means she’ll be back, hopefully with a more developed personality and moves of her own.

The big highlight of this episode is clearly Reverb’s new transformation to Act 2 and its new, far more useful, powers. It’s odd thinking about how we only really met the first form three weeks ago in Koichi’s first proper Stand battle, but this change did help to spice up a generally average story. I’m glad he was able to make use of the first form’s sound abilities to a considerable degree in that short amount of time between episodes 6 and now, but having the effects become real is probably going to have a lot more versatility down the road. And the fact that this transformation happened so fast also probably means it won’t be the last either, especially going by the song its original name, Echoes, is based on. And who knows how many Stands we’ll see in the future that can change form!

And a minor point, but one I think is adding to the really cool bits of this season, is the continuing additions to the new landmarks around Morioh. In Episode 3, we had the Angelo rock that Josuke made by leaving his grandfather’s murder to die of suffocation inside a rock face, now we have one created by Koichi when he made one of the cliff rocks bouncy. This seems more and more like little easter eggs you’d find around a town in a video game if they had made this into one. It really makes Morioh feel like just as much its own world as any of those stops the cast of Stardust Crusaders visited on their own journey.

But all of this reviewing has made me hungry, so next week, let’s go eat some Italian food!