English Dub Review: Jojo’s Bizarre Adventures: Diamond is Unbreakable “Shigechi’s Harvest, Part 2”

Who wants to be a millionaire?

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Josuke, Okuyasu, and Shigechi go to redeem the lottery ticket at the bank, but the teller senses things are suspicious. They try to pass it off like they bought the ticket themselves, but they’re tested at every turn, especially since the name and phone number of the actual buyer is still on the ticket. The process is nailbitingly scary, but luckily, using Josuke’s Shining Diamond to remove some of the ink, they’re cleared of suspicion by acting like it was a friend’s phone number.

However, once everything seems in place, Shigechi starts going back on his word of splitting the money 50-50, saying that they wouldn’t have gotten the ticket without his Harvest, which almost leads to a fight until Josuke calms Okuyasu down. But Shigechi has gone mad with greed, using his Stand to terrorize the two of them, and because it’s a swarm of tiny bugs, the ways it can attack are nearly endless. Clawing at Okuyasu’s legs, stabbing at their eyes, even injecting them with alcohol to get them drunk, all while carrying Shigechi across town on his back like the longest game of crowd-surfing.

Their chase takes them to the top of a building where Okuyasu and Josuke end up seemingly out of moves, so Okuyasu tries begging for forgiveness by offering back the money Shigechi gave them before. However, it was actually so he would come close enough that Okuyasu could use The Hand to pull the air and get the ticket back to Josuke, who rips it up and blows it into the wind, so that now only his Stand can repair it. Shigechi sends all of his Harvest drones to find the pieces, but this leaves him open to getting a beat down. After a VERY aggressive math lesson, he realizes that he never would have gotten the money without their help, so the money should be split equally between them!

OUR TAKE

I’m not sure what else I can say that I haven’t last week, but I really ended up digging this particular set of episodes overall. Like I said, it’s a pretty uncommon and adult lesson to put into what is essentially a kids show, being about the probably realistic feelings of giving credit where due, especially when dealing with a very large amount of money. Shigechi was already not that easy on the eyes, but he turns into a straight up villain once the money comes into the picture, running across town like Gollum with the One Ring (and I’m not just saying that because I finished taking a Tolkien class recently). And yet his turn to the greedy side is a short by strong arc in and of itself, showing him start as a just a kid who wants to have friends but doesn’t know how to make them, then to being overly complimented for his gifts, having those compliments go to his head, and then turning into a money-grubbing lunatic before realizing he was in the wrong.

Though one clear escalation from the last episode is how the action scenes get really creative but also turn downright gruesome. Harvest is already an interesting type of Stand for what it can do, but I never guessed it would be able to inject things into someone’s bloodstream. Then the fight practically becomes a horror show when it gets to the eye and ear maiming. I almost couldn’t concentrate on the story after Josuke’s eyelid got gashed, and since he can’t heal himself, I can only imagine how hard it’s going to be to look at him from now on. Seriously, having that little slit showing an extra sliver of eyeball poking through almost made me want to gag. Christ, Araki.

But with that, we’ve reached the official half way point of this season and Part 4 as a whole. Like we’ve seen the past few episodes, things are only getting more complex, complicated, and hard to look at while making it even harder to look away. My time covering this series has only gotten better as things have progressed, so I can’t wait to see how things continue to build up in this show’s second half. But please, for the love of DIO, no more eyelid body horror. I’m this close to needing a barf bag and I watch these episodes multiple times. THIS close.