Dreamcast Game #08: Project Justice

燃えろ！ジャスティス学園, Moero! Jasutisu Gakuen, “Burn! Justice Academy”

As we missed the 20th anniversary of Kaneto Shiozawa’s (pictured below) passing, we must pay a tribute to him, since we are a little late to the party.

Toshikazu “Kaneto” Shiozawa

Please remember that if your home or any public place (e.g. your workplace) involves stairs, take your time when using the stairs, and be sure to use handrails and stair rails. Make sure the stairs in your home have an overhead light. You don’t want to end up like Shiozawa.

Okay, onto the game…

Project Justice is a 3D competitive fighting game produced by Capcom. It was first released as an arcade game in 2000 and ported to the Dreamcast in 2001 (December 17, 2000 in Japan, April 13, 2001 in Europe, and May 16, 2001 in North America). It is the sequel to the 1997 arcade/PlayStation game Rival Schools: United by Fate. Shinya “Edayan” Edaki is the illustrator and the character designer for the series, and Yuki Iwai, Etsuko Yoneda, and Setsuo Yamamoto composed the music for this video game.

Gameplay and style

Project Justice’s fighting system is lifted from the original Rival Schools, with some notable changes. The game continues to be a team fighter, but has teams of three characters instead of two. This allows another Team-Up attack to be used in a fight, but also adds a new type of attack, the Party-Up, initiated by pressing any three attack buttons. The Party-Up is a three-person attack that varies based on what school the character initiating the attack is from.

The additional partner also allows players to cancel an opponent’s Team-Up Special by inputting a Team-Up command of their own. This initiates a short fighting sequence between one character from each team. If the person initiating the sequence gets the first successful hit in during the sequence before time runs out, the Team-Up they are caught in will be canceled, and the game switches back to the main fight; if the opposing player gets the first hit or time runs out, the Team-Up continues as usual.

Additionally, the ‘vigor’ meter in Project Justice is limited to 5 levels (down from 9 in Rival Schools), with Party-Ups requiring all 5 levels, Team-Ups continuing to cost two levels, and any attempts (successful or not) to cancel a Team-Up costing one level.

As in the original game many of the characters use their chosen field of academic or sporting excellence as a fighting style. As a result, special moves — in particular the Two-Person team up moves — tend to have a surreal edge, with methods to injure your opponent ranging from: forcing them to take part in an impromptu bout of synchronized swimming (on dry land) (if Nagare is in your team); confusing them by taking photographs of them in rapid succession during an interview for the school newspaper (if Ran is in your team), or even berating them so severely that they fall unconscious out of shame.

Project Justice’s single player mode was structured differently from its predecessor. While Rival Schools only plays a story if characters from the same school were selected, the game instead has separate Story and Free modes.

• In Story Mode, players select a portion of story grouped by school and play through a rigid storyline with a limited group of 2 to 6 characters that the player can choose from for each fight. Like the original game, each fight in story mode is accompanied with 2D cut scenes that advance the story. In some stories, the plot will branch out depending on the results of certain fights or decisions made by the player, changing the fights that the player faces. After fighting the boss of the game, an ending for the school’s story is shown.
• In Free Mode, players select a team of three characters and fight random teams of opponents until getting to fight the boss, similar to selecting two characters from different schools in Rival Schools. After defeating the boss, the player is shown a screen where the game rates the performance of player, and gives them a ranking named after a character from the game.

Characters in Project Justice (JP voices are always surname-first followed by given name)

• Batsu Ichimonji (v.b. Hiyama Nobuyuki; also appears in Tatsunoko vs. Capcom and the first Project X Zone game, including a cameo appearance with Hinata in Capcom vs. SNK 2: Millionaire Fighting 2001, assisting Kyosuke during one of his super combos)
• Hinata Wakaba (v.b. Hanba Tomoe)
• Kyosuke Kagami (v.b. Jin Kazama from Tekken; referenced by Batsu in the first PXZ game)
• Hayato Nekketsu (v.b. Yamazaki Takumi)
• “The Chairperson” (Iinchō in Japan) (v.b. Hikari/Dawn from Pokémon DP)
• Shoma Sawamura (v.b. Takeshi/Brock from Pokémon)
• Natsu Ayahara (v.b. Tsunoda Narumi)
• Roberto Miura (v.b. Dante from Devil May Cry)
• Akira Kazama (v.b. Tezuka Chiharu)
• Edge (Eiji Yamada) (v.b. Yamada Yoshiharu)
• Gan Ishirugi (v.b. Nagasako Takashi)
• Daigo Kazama (v.b. Otsuka Akio; Yamadera Koichi in the first game)
• Roy Bromwell (v.b. Byakuya Kuchiki from Bleach)
• Tiffany Lords (v.b. Narahashi Miki)
• Boman Delgado (v.b. see Gan Ishirugi’s VA)
• Kyoko Minazuki (v.b. Sailor Moon)
• Hyo Iwamano (v.b. Shozawa Kaneto; later marked as deceased during the production of Project Justice, which is why Capcom killed the character off.)
• Hideo Shimazu (v.b. Mizutori Tetsuo; also appeared in the Japan-only game Namco × Capcom for the PS2 before being marked as deceased on July 14, 2010. It is possible that Capcom retired the Hideo Shimazu character from the Justice Gakuen series out of respect for Mizutori.)
• Ran Hibiki (v.b. Hiramitsu Akiko)
• Nagare Namikawa (v.b. Juu’nen hayain dayo!)
• Momo Karuizawa (v.b. Sakuma Rei)
• Yurika Kirishima (v.b. Han Keiko)
• Zaki (Aoi Himezaki) (v.b. Orikasa Ai)
• Kurow Kirishima (v.b. Shimada Bin (Satoshi))

🚨 SPOILER ALERT: We did own the game, but in a burned copy before the ROM sites got shut down.

To that end, this is the eighth Dreamcast game to be reviewed on Medium. See you next time.