[Review] Captain Velvet Meteor: The Jump+ Dimensions – Nintendo Switch

Developed By: Momo-Pi
Published By: Shueisha Games
Categories: Action, Puzzle, RPG
Release Date: 07.28.22
Price: $24.99

If you’re a fan of anime and manga, Captain Velvet Meteor: The Jump+ Dimensions is a game that you most definitely have to play. While the game did come out two years ago, July 2024 is legitimately the best time to get into it. Even if you’ve played it before or looked into it and didn’t like it, now is the time to get back into it as well.

The game is about Damien, a young boy who moves from France to Japan, which basically devastates him. He lost all his friends and is in a new world and to cope with that, he creates his own world and friends with his imagination. Throughout the game you get to see his experiences and struggles in his new life but when he’s at home you play in the world that he imagined and control a superhero persona that he created.

The gameplay in this world is a fun and pretty fast-paced grid-based tactics game where the objective is usually to make it to the other end of the map or to beat all of the enemies. The gameplay is a lot of fun and the story is very good as it’s very realistic but for me the clear winner as to what makes the game so good is the characters.

Each world is a series of levels that you push through with Damien and one other character. Damien loves manga and when he’s going on his adventures, characters from his favorite manga work their way into his imagination so the characters that he plays with as the Captain from his favorite manga. But these aren’t just characters created for the game, they’re characters from real manga such as Spy X Family. 

Each of the characters has their own special abilities inspired by the manga that they’re from and their dialogue in the game is written very closely to how they are in their respective manga. This is an amazing idea for a manga crossover, but it works even better now than it had in 2022. 

Video games that are based on anime are already very niche. There are a bunch from really big franchises that do really well but there are a bunch that won’t appeal to you if you already weren’t a fan of the anime. When Captain Velvet Meteor released in 2022, it was even more niche than your average anime game because at the time, only one of the characters was from an anime.

That character was Loid from Spy X Family, the game released one month after the first season concluded so both the anime and character had a lot of popularity. But the other characters weren’t as big at the time because they were manga only back then. Many people who bought the game because of Spy X Family or are anime only wouldn’t have recognized the other characters unless they were also big manga readers like Damien. 

But then something happened. Many of the manga that are referenced in the game began getting anime released after the game came out. When I picked up Captain Velvet Meteor in 2022 it was because of Spy X Family, I had no idea who the other characters were. But when I revisted the game a few weeks ago, I was blown away by how popular some of the manga and characters have become. 

The game includes Gabimaru from Hell’s Paradise: Jigokuraku and Ushio Kofune from Summer Time Rendering. Both anime were released in 2023, a year after the game, and had brought a lot more attention to those characters. The game also includes the Princess from ’Tis Time for “Torture,” Princess and Kafka Hibino from Kaiju No. 8. Both anime released only a couple months ago and Kaiju No. 8 has been insanely popular. 

The game was a solid crossover when it came out two years ago but with the explosion in popularity for Hell’s Paradise, Kaiju No. 8, and Summer Time Rendering since then, they have turned the game into an even bigger crossover. The game is even more accessible now and should be a better game now than before because of how popular the characters have become. It kind of makes me think of what happened with Among Us and how the game was out for two years before the pandemic made its popularity skyrocket. 

I think it’s the same case here because even though the game came out two years ago, the popularity of the characters over the past year should make more people want to play this now than ever before. The game is still really cheap too because it’s $25 for an experience that could run you anywhere between 20 and 30 hours if not more. 

5/5