Read my review of part 1 here if you haven't already.
Jojo's Bizarre Adventure Battle Tendency
created by Hirohiko Araki
review by Jeremias de Leon
Story
Battle Tendency takes place 50 years after the first story and stars the grandson of Jonathan named Joseph Joestar. Joseph is naturally gifted in the ripple technique and is able to take down most people with ease. He is a brilliant fighter, usually even able to tell his opponents exactly what they will say and do right before they do it.
Sometime after moving from England to the United States Joseph gets himself mixed up with a discovery of four men who are sleeping in stone pillars. He then learns who the men are and the origins of the stone masks that create vampires. During all this mix up he teams up with a cyborg Nazi soldier an Italian ripple user and a nazi to defeat these stone men, who are each many times tougher than a stone mask vampire. That's your synopsis, any more and I'd risk spoiling a lot of things.
Throughout all this there are a lot of clever fights, showcasing Jojo's creativity and battle senses. Considering he's fighting enemies that are near indestructible he has to use his wits and can not rely solely on his physical strength. There's also nice character development, Jojo starts off as arrogant and grows to be a bit more humble. The Pillar Men are shown to be more than just typical villains, which Dio kind of suffered from in the first storyline. Two of them are shown to follow codes of honor and don't go out of the way to commit evil acts.
Characters
Joseph is a lot different from his grandfather Jonathan, who was a gentleman through and through. Joseph is an arrogant loudmouth who will even talk to women with a brash attitude.
Robert E.O Speedwagon shows up in this arc, aged 50 years, and just like before acts as the "fight commentator"whenever he's around. It's one of my gripes in these past two story arcs to see a character that almost serves no purpose. Except he does have a bit more of a purpose this time around as he's gotten extremely wealthy over the past 50 years and uses his wealth to help the Jojo and his friends.
Jojo's allies Lisa lisa and Cesar Zeppelli are different than Jonathan's allies in Phantom Blood who in that story were very gentlemanly and chivalrous. That isn't to say Lisa lisa and Cesar are not good people though but they are a lot more realistic characters with their personality quirks.
The villains in this arc also have more development than the previous villain. Wham and ACDC are not only shown to be following a code of honor but also shown to even show (some form of) mercy towards the other characters to make sure they get a fair fight.
Battle Tendency really shows improvement in character development over Phantom Blood.
Art
Araki is really starting to develop his own style here. It's starting to look less like Fist Of The North Star but it's still not where he will be later. The characters look good though anatomically they are extremely exaggerated which makes sense for the Pillar Men but even though they are well built the human characters shouldn't look as muscular as they do.
Araki still shows some great action scenes and nice character designs, but will develop a much more distinct style later. For now it's still good though and shouldn't be discounted.
Verdict
Battle Tendency is a good evolution of Araki's art and story telling. As a continuation of the Jojo's story it should not be missed especially if you are really interested in part 3 Stardust Crusaders which is most well known as the part that was adapted into an arcade fighting game and later ported to the Playstation and Dreamcast.
I give Battle Tendency an 8.5 out of 10. A really solid story.
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