There’s also a cute moment that long-time JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure fans will appreciate where Diamond is Unbreakable’s Koichi asks Rohan to use Heaven’s Door to make him fluent in Italian since he’s making an upcoming trip over to Italy.
This is also an entry where Rohan is largely not even present and he’s reciting someone else’s story, secondhand, yet “At a Confessional” remains engaging. It should be absurd, but it’s genuinely tense. The fate of a man’s life comes down to catching popcorn in one’s mouth several times. The Stand that’s present in the daughter’s tongue is the stuff of nightmares and the competition that the confessor of the story gets caught up in is extremely strange, even for JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure standards. At A ConfessionalĮach of these Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan installments skew towards a different type of genre, but “At a Confessional” is an unabashed ghost story and the installment benefits from going all out when it comes to the elements of horror and how the animation is able to compliment the terror that’s built through it all. Rohan and Izumi’s lives come down to a test of manners, which is the perfect culmination to this story. Everyone is a potential danger here despite the appearances that they keep and characters like Ikkyu really stand out and are as foreboding as this situation should dictate. “Millionaire Village” really feels like a haunting Stepford Wives level of story when Rohan and his editor, Izumi, wind up in an isolated community where etiquette is held above everything else to a frightening degree. It’s an episode that’s entertaining even if it’s muted and just enjoyed on a visual level.īest Horror Anime To Watch on Netflix By Daniel Kurland At certain points Rohan’s face is cast in five different colors that make no sense, but look beautiful. There’s a minimalist look where pastels like pink, purple, and light blue dominate Rohan’s attacks and there’s just so much that goes on with this episode’s visuals. The use of black and white and spot coloring during Naoko’s murder flashbacks is extremely effective and it’s carried over throughout the episode. There are no rules that govern how colors play in this world and “Mutsu-kabe Hill” takes advantage of that the most. Somehow it manages to reach a happy ending by its conclusion.Įach installment of Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan looks gorgeous and does inventive things with color palettes and art design that gives every scene an extra punch.
The moment where Naoko drinks the blood out of desperation to hide the evidence is seriously upsetting and “Mutsu-kabe Hill” doesn’t hold back with this story of misplaced affection and aggression. There’s a very Telltale Heart aspect to the story when Naoko tries to hide the corpse of her victim, only for the blood to continue to spread. “Mutsu-kabe Hill” is easily the most disturbing story of the lot and it tells a morbid, bloody murder story that begins as a love triangle that spirals out of control. Since Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan is designed to be enjoyed in any order and the episodes tell self-contained stories, here’s our ranking of how Rohan’s four adventures stack up. These four installments are labelled as episodes 16, 2, 5, and 9 to further illustrate that they’re just slices of Rohan’s life.
Part of what makes Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan so interesting is that it paints Rohan as a consummate adventurer and that these are only a handful of the bizarre events that he’s experienced. Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan is set in the JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure universe, but each of its stories are self-contained incidents from Rohan’s life that aren’t necessarily even playing out in chronological order. JoJo is popular, but the character of Rohan Kishibe has turned into a surprisingly resilient character and this spinoff is just part of the extra attention that the character has seen over the years.
Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan is a four-episode OVA (Original Video Animation) series that focuses on Rohan Kishibe, a manga author and supporting character from the Diamond is Unbreakable season of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. Each season of the heightened action series focuses on a different member of the extended Joestar family. JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure is one of the most successful anime series of all time and it’s been a phenomenon for over thirty years at this point.