While I'm not necessarily a historical geek for WW2 specifically, this was super fun to play. The animations are so detailed that I didn't honestly expect from this title. The main standout point for me were the stealth missions. It's so cool to see the multiple approaches you can go with these missions, just giving you the objective and telling you to figure it out. The missions are linear once you get the general gist of it all, but it is still cool.

I'm a sucker for behind the scenes and extra content, so completing the game and seeing the history behind the levels and little world building elements was pretty cool.

For a licensed PS2 game, it's pretty good.

I think the JoJo games I played(so this and All Star Battle) have an issue where they're great JoJo products, being filled with loving homages and panel perfect references to the source material, made by people who clearly love and were inspired by JoJo (Capcom made an entire engine dedicated to making the characters look more manga faithful that was only used in this game. If that's not loving a piece of media IDK what is.) but then you get a controller in your hand and it begins to fall apart.

This is a boss rush game taking you through the plot of JoJo part 5, with several scenarios taking you through the manga's story, removing the ones that wouldn't work as well (R.I.P Soft Machine fans the three of you must be devastated) And it's a pretty good adaptation, all things considered. This was sixteen years before the anime adaptation, and the voice work here is pretty good all round (minus Giorno being voiced by a woman I never got used to that) the cutscenes have good direction and the manga panels recreated fairly well. Great job on presentation.

But then the gameplay itself is fairly mediocre for the most part. The one thing I think hurts the game the most is how tanky the bosses are. I feel like they'd be much better if they all had a solid 20% health reduction. And on top of that is a pretty cool idea in theory, secret factors. If you recreate something from the manga itself, such as staying still when Secco's underground to bait and punch him out, you get bonus points and extra content for doing so. This is cool, as a great homage and a way to feel like the JoJo character you're playing. The issue comes when a lot of the fights rely on them, being borderline mandatory instead of a cool bit of fanservice (seriously, have fun doing the Grateful Dead fight without them)

The game also struggles with a couple other issues. Like in All Star Battle, characters can switch between normal and stand mode, switching to normal when you get knocked down. It's still annoying, especially since stand mode is the only way to access lock on, which you'll always want as all the fights are 1v1. Also I swear dash attacks have a way smaller hitbox than they should, I phased through half those fuckers I swear.

So as a piece of JoJo media, it's great. It's a really interesting look at the pre-davidpro days and an interesting look at the one of the firs major adaptations of a JoJo arc. As a game it kinda stinks. But if you like JoJo enough to track down a ROM and get this running, you'll probably find value in it.