JoJo’s bizarre adventure is one of those anime that exudes style and personality but has a simple charm also. Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan comes as a spin-off of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure and it’s easy to tell by the animation, style, design, and over-the-top story. While this is a short, four-episode series, it packs a lot of entertaining content that is both absurd and fantastic.
The premise of the show is that a manga artist, Kishibe Rohan, has had some recent financial trouble and is meeting with some friends and colleagues discussing upcoming jobs and then getting carried away with random insane stories from his experiences. There is no way to tell if any of this actually happened to him, but that really isn’t the point. His situations and style are an excuse for the animators and writers to tell outlandish stories, which done in this fashion, is fine by me. I don’t know if I could watch season after season of very little bits of real progression and mostly grab bags of ideas, but these four episodes are a good enough fill for now. Maybe other small installments could be great to continue this crazed half-anthology, half-storyteller anime.
The only other thing to address here is honestly the style and animation. If you want a lot of vibrant colors, beautifully flowing animation and excessively defined details, then this is a fantastic show to watch. The trippy nature of some of the episodes and horrors and evils that the character meets lead to some fabulous visuals. There’s a lot of artistic value, it’s not just insanity and craziness. Be prepared to see a lot of creepy, psychotic, and surprising things.
Overall, this short season of episodes feels more like a test than an actual show. This makes it somewhat difficult to give a final score because it feels like an unfinished anthology with a weird premise instead of a fully blow set of stories. It’s as if the creators are looking to make an animated X-Files or Twilight Zone in the JoJo universe and want to see how far they can go in this short burst. It’s really entertaining to watch and about as anime as anime can get, so I’d recommend it to anyone who likes anime, weird art, horror, or the supernatural.
