Steel Ball Run: JoJo's Bizarre Adventure 2026 Tv Series Review Trailer

 The *gayest* anime ever created has saddled up once again, returning with such overflowing authority—atop its steed, clad in haute couture, flashing a gold-toothed grin, and serving up the most gorgeous visuals ever committed to screen—that even the notion of a "return to form" feels astonishingly inadequate. Four years after its predecessor, *Stone Ocean*, closed the long and cyclical book on the original Joestar lineage on Netflix, Part 7 of the acclaimed *JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure*—titled *Steel Ball Run*—bursts forth as a new gospel for its legions of fervent emissaries; a soft reboot of the franchise that carries the DNA of its legendary legacy in its very bones, along with the confidence born of nearly twenty years spent being hailed as one of the greatest manga ever written.

The initial hysteria surrounding its premiere—including the immediate convulsions across the internet when, just hours after its release, it dethroned *Frieren* from its comfortable, cushy perch on MyAnimeList—takes on a strange sense of inevitability once you actually sit down to watch it. For this is, precisely, where Araki has always been aiming: a version of *JJBA* that feels complete in its artistic execution while simultaneously remaining utterly unbridled in its imagination. 

There is still no one in the world of anime or manga who thinks quite like Hirohiko Araki, and there is still nothing else that looks, moves, feels, or metabolizes the absurd—transforming it into artistic form—quite the way *JJBA* does. *Steel Ball Run* stands as the culmination of those accumulated joys that fans have spent years cultivating through Araki’s sacred texts. 

For anyone venturing into this world for the first time, *JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure* is best understood as a multi-generational saga centered on the Joestar family, which alternates protagonists and settings while maintaining a through-line anchored in the family’s persistent entanglement with supernatural forces. The story begins in 19th-century England and expands into adventures of global scope that mutate into something far stranger with the introduction of *Stands*—psychic manifestations of each individual’s spirit that transform combat into a series of increasingly elaborate and absurd puzzles.

Throughout this entire journey, Araki’s art evolves in parallel, shifting from figures of exuberant musculature—inspired by the bodybuilding culture of the 1980s—to stylized, androgynous forms drawing directly from fashion illustration, classical sculpture, and editorial photography; an aesthetic sensibility that has led to his work even being exhibited at the Louvre Museum. *Steel Ball Run* completely resets the board, transporting the story to an alternate version of the United States in the 1890s, centered on a massive cross-country equestrian race stretching from San Diego to New York, where competitors battle their way across the country for a grand prize of 50 million dollars.

At the heart of this journey are our protagonists: Johnny Joestar and Gyro Zeppeli. Johnny is a former racing prodigy who now finds himself crippled and confined to a wheelchair. His pale features and short blond hair contrast with an outfit studded with stars, evoking a brash *Americana* style—albeit with a subtle ironic twist. Gyro, for his part, is a visual spectacle: a display of deliberate excess, clad in striped leather, metallic accents, and a wide-brimmed hat, with two green steel balls holstered at his waist and teeth adorned with embossed gold caps that glint with every mocking "Nyo-ho-ho." 

Araki’s long-standing flirtation with high fashion—including collaborations with brands like Gucci and constant references to runway aesthetics—permeates every aspect of his presentation; the anime preserves this with an attention to texture and silhouette that has always treated clothing as an extension of these larger-than-life characters. What we discover about them in the premiere episode is meted out with the utmost care: Johnny is defined by loss—a disgraced jockey seeking a way to reclaim his autonomy—while Gyro positions himself as a mysterious catalyst, whose mastery in handling those enigmatic spinning balls sparks in Johnny the motivation to enter the race. The voice-over with which Johnny closes the episode reframes their chance encounter as the beginning of something beautiful.

This relationship aligns with *JJBA*’s established reputation as one of the most decidedly *queer-affirming* works within mainstream anime—a saga that has dedicated decades to dismantling rigid masculinity through sheer expressive force. 

The supporting cast presents itself as an explosion of colorful personalities, whose visual designs shoulder much of the narrative weight even before their motivations are verbalized. The fan favorite (and eternal scourge of the Joestar lineage), Diego "Dio" Brando, is introduced as an English racing prodigy endowed with a predatory elegance; his treacherous intentions evoke all-too-familiar archetypes. The race promoter, Steven Steel, embodies the theatrical ambition of the American Dream; his grandiose speeches regarding the significance of the competition are juxtaposed with moments of palpable tension—particularly in his peculiar relationship with Lucy Steel. We also encounter a Black racer named Pocoloco, who glides through the chaos with an almost exasperating faith in luck, and a surprise contender of Native American descent named Sandman, who decides to complete the entire race on foot, simply because he is cut from a different cloth.

The premiere episode wastes no time, immediately plunging us into the first leg of this 6,000-kilometer endurance race, which unfolds as a series of action sequences of escalating intensity: racers collide, swerve, hatch schemes, and improvise their way across terrain that morphs from open desert into narrow, congested bottlenecks. The final stretch intensifies into a genuine five-way scramble, with Gyro, Johnny, Dio, Pocoloco, and Sandman converging at the front of the pack. This sequence finally grants the race its true magnitude, pitting five radically different approaches to movement, strategy, and survival against one another within a single, confined space. The final seconds compress into a near *photo-finish* conclusion, with Gyro surging ahead at the very last instant to claim victory in grand style; meanwhile, Johnny observes this outcome with a clarity that defines his own trajectory, for the race has just revealed to him exactly whom he must follow—and why. David Production approaches this adaptation with a level of technical proficiency born of their long-standing familiarity with Araki’s demands, translating his visual compositions into the language of motion without sanding down a single iota of their eccentricity. The racing sequences rely on a blend of 2D animation and CGI that, at times, allows its own technical scaffolding to show through. Nevertheless, the overall effect retains its clarity and dynamism, ensuring that the visual density never becomes overwhelming for the viewer. What truly elevates the quality of this episode is its sound design—an element that has always served as a fundamental pillar of the *JJBA* experience. The sharp, resonant impact of Gyro’s steel balls is rendered in such a way that their collision feels almost tactile, while Diego’s aggressive driving style is punctuated by subtle sonic cues that nod to the franchise’s most iconic threat: the one capable of stopping time. Likewise, the maestro Yugo Kanno returns as the series composer; his glorious new motifs act as the invisible force that binds together all the epic elements of the work.

Looking ahead, *Steel Ball Run* holds both immense promise and a certain degree of production-related anxiety, as the source material it adapts ventures into territory that tests even the elastic limits of *JoJo*, challenging the boundaries of adaptation in a way that previous Parts did not. There also remains the lingering uncertainty regarding the release strategy—with the staggered rollout of *Stone Ocean* still fresh in everyone’s memory—particularly given that a story built on narrative momentum benefits enormously from continuity.

Nevertheless, what remains undeniable—even at this very early stage—is that *JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure* stays true to its own inherent strangeness, taking every eccentric assumption people associate with anime and refining it into something deliberate and unexpectedly precise. *Steel Ball Run* opens as a reminder of why these adventures have always been singularly bizarre—and it is precisely this commitment—executed with uninhibited enthusiasm—that allows it to stand as one of the medium's most enduring achievements.

Watch Steel Ball Run: JoJo's Bizarre Adventure 2026 Tv Series Trailer