English Dub Review: Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure “Yukako Yamagishi Falls in Love Part 1”

This is no ordinary love! This is…ADVANCED LOVE.

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Josuke and Okuyasu have no luck getting information off Hazamada about Chili Pepper, but he did learn that Stand Users are mysteriously drawn to each other, allowing many marketable fights in this franchise for the next thirty years of this franchise. As they pass the train crossing, they happen across Koichi meeting up with a girl and decide to spy on him.

CUE THE EDM REMIX! OONSE OONSE OONSE OONSE

…ahem, anyway, the girl is Yukako Yamagishi (hey, she’s in the title!), who has called Koichi there to confess her love for him! Things seem sweet at first, but Koichi’s hesitance to answer causes her to flip out and run off. Could just be her being nervous…until Koichi finds a bunch of her hair in his drink.

She goes to see him the next day and tries to give him a sweater she knit last night and a box lunch to make up. Totally normal behavior! Luckily another girl comes in to get Koichi to take out the trash before he eats any of it. Yukako doesn’t take this well, revealing herself to have a Stand which comes out of her hair to almost set the girl on fire. Josuke and Okuyasu manage to save her hair (mostly) and go to warn Koichi. Seems his grades are no slipping thanks to Yukako’s craziness, so the two suggest he start taking on disgusting habits and behaviors in order to make her less interested, but when he won’t go for that, they go for just spreading rumors that he can then confirm, like being a shoplifter or never paying back money.

But this only makes things worse when Yukako breaks into Koichi’s house to kidnap him, take him to an abandoned summer home, and forces him to shape up into her ideal man, Stephen King’s “Misery”-style. He does learn that she also got her Stand from Keicho’s Arrow, but it’s not going to do much good when he’s trapped in the house and can only eat asparagus wrapped in dictionary paper and flashcard corn flakes. To be continued!

OUR TAKE

First, we GOTTA talk about the new version of the OP, which trades in the funk of the first version for EDM. It was just different enough from the last one for Toonami to play it in full, so thankfully dub-only watchers can see how much the things have changed since the first episode, most notably Koichi’s Stand, Reverb/Echoes, being added to reflect his gaining it a couple episodes ago. And while I personally prefer the previous version of this song, I’m fine with listening to the shortened version of this for a few more weeks before we get to the second proper OP.

Though the main focus of this episode (and apparently a two-parter) is another Koichi story. Kinda feel like we just had one, but it does give us a chance to see the characters in a normal school setting that we haven’t seen in Jojo’s show thus far. Most we’ve gotten was Jotaro’s brief visit to the school at the beginning of Part 3 before going on his big ol’ mom saving a trip. But because this Part is more focused and in one place, we have a centered status quo and more places to explore and get to know. And that means we can have lots of wacky high school hi-jinks like having a stalker! But because it’s a girl stalking a guy, it’s more funny than creepy.

Yukako’s kinda one-note as an antagonist, though her hair power certainly does a lot of interesting things. The Medusa-like strangling ability is a tad predictable, but I’ve never seen hair powers go right in the follicles like that or use it to link fires or keep someone suspended from a ceiling and who knows what else. Though the question remains of how Koichi is going to get out this, and I have some theories. We know she doesn’t know he has his own Stand, and we’ve seen the many tricky ways he can use that to cause diversions, so that might be his ticket to getting out…but he’s still got her hair in his head, so it’ll probably down to Josuke and Okuyasu to figure out he’s been kidnapped and rescue him. She’s probably not going to die if her placement in the OP is any indication.

In any case, the show’s still quirky and unique enough to keep watching, even though this particular battle is not exactly the most compelling.