Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-28702329-20181210142752/@comment-38952966-20200904160846

Stone Ocean probably isn't my least favorite part but I still don't care for it too much. The plot of the story is absolutely contrived, that's not debatable. The idea of DIO achieving a higher power makes sense, but the heaven ritual itself doesn't. DIO doesn't want to save mankind, he wants to rule them. The concept of "achieving heaven" is more logical as Pucci's motivation than DIO's, so it feels strange that DIO is supposed to be Pucci's motivation. I would almost say the story would be better without the direct tie to DIO.

The biggest problem with the heaven ritual, in my opinion, is how difficult it is to pull off compared to how powerful you get. It's a contrived, seemingly nonsensical mess that admittedly did give Pucci a very powerful Stand, but considering all the work it took him to get there, it doesn't seem a strong as it should. It's only barely stronger than Star Platinum or King Crimson, and it's arguably not as powerful as GER or D4C: Love Train. Why would Pucci bother performing such a ridiculous ritual when he could've gotten just as powerful a Stand from using the arrow, which is much quicker and easier?

The pacing of SO's fights is the biggest problem with the part, honestly. There's very little of the back-and-forth style of fights that we saw in VA or DiU. It's much more of the "enemy has a clear advantage until we find their weakness" style of fights that Stardust Crusaders had. Combined with how little happens in the story at a time, it leaves these relatively uninteresting fights to go on and on for what feels like longer than it actually is.

The characters are a mixed bag. I love Jolyne. She's a great blend of the first 3 Jojo's all mixed together, with Jonathan's nobility/sense of duty, Joseph's cleverness and goofiness, and Jotaro's temper and punk attitude. Plus, she's one of the first Jojo's to get an actual, interesting character arc. Foo Fighters is great, too. She's a very unique and very memorable character with a great character arc. Emporio and Ermes have too little relevance in the story to be interesting. Ermes is missing for a huge chunk in the middle, and Emporio isn't relevant until the end. Anasui is a complete worthless write off of a character. Weather Report was almost interesting, but he had no discernable personality until he got his memories back, which was his absolute highlight.

Stone Ocean's ending is wonderful. I've ranted about it several times already so I won't say much more, other than that this part's ending elevates it as a story to a much higher level.

I wouldn't say Stone Ocean is bad, but it has a lot of problems and I can definitely see why it gets so much hate. I probably like it more than Phantom Blood or Stardust Crusaders, but it's still in the lower half of parts.