No significant spoilers.
If you read Weekly Shonen Jump in the mid-1980s, you understood what a manga battle was. Two characters with exceptional physical capabilities: strength, speed, endurance, would confront each other. The stronger one usually won, unless the weaker one had trained hard enough, or had a technique that offset the power difference. The question was always: who is stronger?
Part 3 of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure changed the question. The new question was: who is smarter?
What battles looked like before Part 3
Dragon Ball is the clearest example of the pre-JoJo paradigm, not because it’s the only one but because it codified the template most completely. Power levels were literally numerical. Training increased them. The outcome of battles was largely determined by where each combatant sat on that numerical scale, modified by technique and willpower.
This system is satisfying in specific ways. Progress is legible. The underdog narrative, work hard, close the gap, surprise the stronger opponent, is emotionally reliable. The visual language of energy projection and physical impact is immediately dramatic.
But it has structural limits. Once the question is purely “who is stronger,” every battle eventually resolves into that single axis, and the only way to maintain drama is to keep escalating what strong means. Japanese readers and critics describe this with a specific word: パワーインフレ — power inflation. The inevitable tendency of power-based battle systems to require ever-larger numbers, ever-more-destructive techniques, as the series extends.
What Part 3 introduced
Stand abilities in Part 3 are not primarily defined by power. They’re defined by rules. Each Stand has a specific capability with specific parameters, and those parameters create constraints that both combatants have to work within. The battle is won not by overwhelming force but by understanding the rules better than your opponent, exploiting the gaps in their ability, using your own ability’s constraints as cover.
The DIO fight is the clearest statement of this. The World stops time. That’s an overwhelming power, one that should simply end every confrontation. What makes the fight work is that Jotaro figures out how it functions: not just that time stops, but the exact mechanism, the limit, the opening it creates. The intelligence required to reach that understanding is what the entire Egypt arc is building toward. Brute force against The World doesn’t work. Understanding it does.
Japanese critics writing about JoJo’s historical position describe this as establishing 知略バトル as a genre category. The word means something like strategic or intellectual battle, combat where the outcome is determined by thinking rather than by power level. Part 3 didn’t invent clever opponents or tactical fights. But it built a system that made intelligence structurally necessary rather than occasionally relevant.
What changed in the manga that followed
Hunter x Hunter is the most direct heir. Togashi Yoshihiro has been explicit about JoJo’s influence, and the structural parallel is clear: Nen abilities have specific rules and limitations, battles turn on understanding and exploiting those rules, and characters who are physically weaker can win through superior comprehension of how the system works. The power inflation problem is addressed by making the system itself the source of drama rather than the scale of power within it.
The chimera ant arc, widely discussed in Japan as one of the most sophisticated extended battle sequences in manga history, is unthinkable without the template JoJo established. The fights in that arc are almost entirely about information: who knows what, who has figured out what the other side can do, who has correctly read the situation. Physical capability is present but secondary.
Naruto’s development also shows the influence, though the power escalation elements push it in a different direction. The early arcs, particularly the fight between Shikamaru and Temari in the Chunin Exams, demonstrate the 知略バトル mode clearly: a character with relatively modest power winning through superior tactical thinking. That mode becomes harder to sustain as the series scales up, but its presence in the early work reflects how thoroughly JoJo’s approach had entered the vocabulary of action manga by the late 1990s.
What Japanese critics say
Japanese manga criticism on this history tends to describe JoJo as the work that demonstrated power inflation was optional. Before Part 3, the escalation pattern felt like a structural feature of long-form action manga, not a choice but an inevitability. JoJo showed that a series could maintain dramatic tension across hundreds of chapters without requiring that each new antagonist simply be stronger than the last.
The phrase that appears in Japanese critical writing on this: “スタンドバトルの元祖” — the originator of the Stand-style battle. The word Stand is doing double work, referring to JoJo specifically and to the category of rule-governed, intelligence-dependent ability combat that JoJo established as a viable alternative to pure power scaling.
Part 4 extended this by reducing the scale further: a single town, ordinary stakes, abilities that are strange rather than overwhelming. Part 5 and beyond continued elaborating the system in different directions. But the foundational shift happened in Part 3, when Araki built a battle system where the most important thing about a fight was never how much power the participants had, but whether they understood what they were dealing with.
My read: the reason Japanese readers describe JoJo’s influence on action manga as foundational rather than just influential is that it changed what the genre was asking. “Who is stronger” is a question that has one answer and produces one narrative shape. “Who understands the situation better” is a question that can have many answers and produce many shapes. JoJo opened that space, and the manga that followed moved into it.
If the Stand system’s structural influence interests you, this post covers what Araki was reacting against when he invented it:
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