Steel Ball Run, the seventh part of Hirohiko Araki’s wacky, long-running JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure saga, is off to the races on Netflix—or at least, its lengthy first episode is. And with a new part comes the same big questions for curious newcomers who’ve absorbed the show from memes online: what is the show even about, and do I need to watch its six other parts to understand its superpowered supermodels on horseback?
As io9’s resident JJBA sicko, I’ve taken the liberty of letting you copy my homework. I’m going to break down what Steel Ball Run actually is, how it fits into the larger JJBA universe, and—yes—the controversial question that has fans grumble on instinct: can you skip parts?
What is JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure‘s deal?
Originally created by Araki in 1987, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure started out as a muscular, supernatural battle shonen in which Jonathan Joestar battled his adopted brother-turned-vampire, Dio Brando. Basically, think Fist of the North Star, but with characters and their powers named after pop culture musicians. The big point of intrigue with JJBA is Stands: the superpowered ghosts with song names that grant their users, good and bad, world-bending powers. The series’ subsequent parts follow the descendants of Jonathan Joestar as they go on, well, bizarre adventures that all fall into different genres.
Phantom Blood is a vampiric epic in the vein of Van Helsing and the aforementioned Fist of the North Star. Battle Tendency, its second part, is basically Indiana Jones. Stardust Crusaders, by far the most popular and recognized part of the series, is a globetrotting adventure that plays like a hodgepodge of The Last Crusade, The Mummy, and Big Trouble in Little China. Diamond is Unbreakable is basically Twin Peaks; Golden Wind is mobster-inspired; and part six, Stone Ocean, is a prison break. In short, if you’re not particularly vibing with the genre of one part, know it’ll switch things up next time.
While the various parts of JJBA explore different genres, they aren’t stand-alone anthologies. JJBA parts span from the late 1880s to 2011, with recurring characters appearing as the camera shifts between family members, using their powers and wit to overcome impossible odds, playing mental chess with their powers, and being hella photogenic while doing so.
What’s Steel Ball Run about?
Steel Ball Run‘s whole deal is basically Death Race 2000 on horseback. Set in 1890s America, the series sees horse riders participate in an anything-goes cross-country race from San Diego to New York for a $50 million prize. The story follows Johnny Joestar, a paraplegic ex-jockey who, after having his ability to walk restored by touching the mysterious steel balls of fellow rider Gyro Zeppeli, decides to join the race to uncover their secret. These two are by far the most normal guys in this race. There’s a Native American participant named Sandman, who insists on racing on foot; Pocoloco, a Black rider with uncanny luck; and a menacing rider named Diego Brando. Hmm?
Its first episode is pretty great, quelling all fans’ worries that animation studio David Production would struggle with its horses, which are famously hard to draw. The main concern for fans is whether Netflix will release the season with weekly episodes, like the old Crunchyroll tradition of “JoJo Fridays,” or if it will repeat its previous mistakes with Stone Ocean by releasing episodes in large batches with little promotion.
But that’s an old worry for JJBA fans. What newbies are worried about is how lost they’re gonna be if they watch Steel Ball Run without completing a single previous season of JJBA.
Can I skip parts and still watch this?
Get excited, the 1st STAGE is just around the corner! pic.twitter.com/dv5MvQ34lC
— Netflix Anime (@NetflixAnime) March 18, 2026
While Betteride’s law of headlines would dictate that any headline ending with a question mark can be answered with the word “no,” that’s not necessarily the case here. While yes, skipping parts in JJBA is a sacrilegious offense to many fans, the fact that Steel Ball Run isn’t joined alongside its predecessors as a new season and stands alone as its own show in Netflix’s library does raise the question of whether you can just dive into it without watching the previous parts. Hell, even Netflix’s official account gave newbie fans the go-ahead, much to the chagrin of diehards.
The short version of this frequently asked question is: “yes, you can jump straight into Steel Ball Run. It’s a fresh continuity for the series.” (There’s a “but” coming, I promise.)
Steel Ball Run is a hotly contested exception to the longstanding “We don’t raise part-skippers in this household” rule of the fandom. However, skipping earlier parts with SBR isn’t like starting Star Wars with The Force Awakens—it’s more like jumping into the equally long Yakuza video game series with Like a Dragon: a new protagonist, a new canon, and some connective tissue to what came before.
For the most part, anything that echoes earlier parts of JJBA shows up as harmless cameos in SBR‘s premiere; they’ll take on extra meaning as the story progresses. On the whole, you won’t be lost, but you’ll be missing some “Marvel after Endgame” spectacle that has longtime fans laud part seven as the best one of the entire series because of how it only works as a remix of Araki’s mythology with JJBA thus far.
Explaining why it’s still preferable not to skip ahead gets tricky without spoilers. So if you’re fine with those, let’s dig in.
Steel Ball Run is less a new continuity than it is an alternative timeline of the series rebooted after the cataclysmic finale of Stone Ocean. Remember earlier when we said that powers get more complicated as the series evolves with its trailing parts? Well, Stone Ocean saw protagonist Jolyne Cujoh and Jotaro Kujo fight and fail to defeat villain Enrico Pucci. Using his evolved stand, Made in Heaven, Pucci resets the universe after horrifically fast-forwarding time to the point where the universe experiences a big bang.
What emerges is a new timeline where characters from the JJBA canon still exist, but in a remixed context. It’s kind of like how Marvel Comics will have a big reboot but still riff on character archetypes and powersets, but it’s easier to follow because there aren’t desperate issues to keep track of and nail down context for namedrops in a separate run. That is, unless you part-skip straight to SBR.
Why SBR is praised as the best of all JJBA is mainly because it acts as a remix of all the JJBA parts, with callbacks and character reintroductions that evolve from being interesting to extremely important. From part seven onward, through its subsequent parts, JoJolion, and the ongoing series, JoJoLands, Araki takes the building blocks he’s developed over the past 40 years and molds them into new clay.
For example, the power Gyro uses throughout its premiere episode, the Rotation, is a remix of the Ripple, an earlier JJBA power that was quickly abandoned once Stands became its series powerset going forward.
It’s not a failing grade for you, as a first-time viewer, not to know that, and the series will explain things the moment they need explaining. However, future callbacks and remixes of the pop-off variety are in the wings with SBR, rewarding those who have experienced previous parts. So you can see why fans warn newcomers not to skip them, at the risk of missing the subtle and obvious references that are built into SBR. While great on their own, they’re even more meaningful as part of a reimagining of previous JJBA parts that Araki takes another stab at.
But overall, it’s not that deep. You’re fine to skip to Steel Ball Run and join in the merriment of its wacky anime races as long as you can tolerate the phenomenon of someone on Twitter acting like the friend on your couch who has already seen a movie and is droning on about why things you didn’t think twice about are so important.
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