Jump Ultimate Stars

Jump Ultimate Stars is a Japanese manga-based fighting game on the Nintendo DS and the sequel to Jump Super Stars. All characters in the game come from many famous mangas published in the Shonen Jump magazine, including One Piece, Dragon Ball, Bleach and Naruto.

Panels
The bulk of the gameplay is based around using koma ("panel" in Japanese, referring to the panels in a manga comic) that represent characters to create decks on a four by five grid. Koma come in various shapes and sizes, taking up one to eight blocks. There are three types of koma that can be initialised in battle. They are called help, support and battle koma. Each of these types have different roles in a deck, and are utilized to battle. There are many characters in this game.

Help koma are one panel koma that can give different boosts to characters they are placed next to. Support koma are two or three block koma that represent a character that are to help in battle. The character appears and either does an attack, boosts a character's abilities with a power up, or heals a character. Battle koma are four to eight block koma that are used to battle. They are based on various manga panels and are used to represent what kind of special attacks the characters have.

Each battle koma comes with a certain nature. These natures, laughter, power and knowledge, act in a Rock, Paper, Scissors relationship with power beating knowledge, knowledge beating laughter, and laughter beating power. The stronger type will deal more damage to the weaker type. But the "rock" is not weak against the "paper". The attacks do normal damage.

When making a deck, the player must have at least one of each type of koma before the deck can be used in battle. A leader character also must be chosen. This character will always be the default character in battles and will represent the deck. Two optional hotkeys can be set to automatically switch to a character or use a support character when the L or R buttons are pressed.

Battle
Battles commence in arenas made to look like the page of a manga. Each arena has a unique background and obstacles based on the different manga series. They also contain a variety of different platforms. Many are static while others will move, break, or disappear and reappear randomly. Certain walls and floors are also destructible. Another new feature is the ability hang off the edges of the cliffs or the edges of the levels.

New Features
Jump Ultimate Stars has been changed slightly from the gameplay of Jump Super Stars. The gameplay gives battle characters the ability to dash and to do a new attack while guarding, which, instead of breaking the guard of the opponent, forces them to change characters, and can be identified by a green glow coming out of the characters which executes it. Also, certain 7 and 8 panel koma (along with certain 5 and 6 panel koma) obtain a visual difference during battle as opposed to the appearance of the 1-6 koma of the very same character, some of this variations also bring a totally different set of attacks to the character. Battle characters now have a new ability known as Ultimate Actions (UA). These UA are different for each character, as some recover health, other recover sp, while others can be used to dodge enemy attacks. Another new feature added is the Evolution Chart. This area allows players to upgrade their characters by spending gems (currency earned for ko'ing opponents) to buy a new Koma. Each character has a chart, starting from the 1 block help Komas and branching off into the 2 and 3 block Support and the 4 to 8 block Battle komas. Some characters have alternate block paths, while others can be used to unlock Komas for characters from the same series, quizzes for the series, and new worlds in the story mode.

Represented series
This is a list of represented series in Jump Ultimate Stars. Most of the main characters from each series appear as characters within the game. There are 24 returning series with the addition of 17 new ones (the asterisk marks newly included series), concluding 41 in total.

Following the One Piece manga, the game goes up to the end of the Enies Lobby arc. It features all of the Straw Hats (before Brook) as playable except Chopper and Usopp, who both appear as support characters. It also includes appearances from Shanks, Mozu, and Kiwi.