Season five of the hit anime and part six of Hirohiko Araki’s famed manga JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean finally released today⏤sorta. Unlike the first 5 seasons streaming on Crunchyroll in the U.S., Netflix acquired the global streaming rights for Stone Ocean in a move that breaks up the series across subscription services.
The giant is choosing a somewhat unconventional release schedule to boot. Today, Netflix dropped the first 12 episodes of the anime, which is still airing weekly in Japan. As they have done with the ongoing Pokémon anime, the platform will drop batches of episodes as more come out. When exactly the next drop is, or how many episodes there will be total, is still unknown.
While we don’t yet know the total length of the season, Stone Ocean’s manga arc (originally published from 1999 to 2003) is comparable in length to the series’ Golden Wind arc, which received a total of 39 anime episodes.
Fans have been eagerly awaiting the release of the new season. Excitement for it made the series trend today on Twitter. And Stone Ocean has transitioned from being one of the most anticipated shows on My Anime List to one of the site’s most popular, weighing in at #18 among the top anime of all time. Stone Ocean also displaced Ranking of Kings’ reign as the top-airing anime on the site, which uses a proprietary weighted score to calculate rankings from fan reviews.
Stone Ocean introduces the series’ first female lead, Jolyne Cujoh. Jolyne is voiced by Ai Fairouz in Japanese and Kira Buckland in English. “My Dream has finally come true,” the character’s English voice actor said in a tweet today.
JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean is streaming now on Netflix, and you can watch the first four seasons on Crunchyroll.