JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Watch Order

The reputation says the franchise is impenetrable: nine manga parts, four decades, three separate continuities, and an art style that changes every generation. The anime is simpler than all of that. One studio has adapted the story in order since 2012, part by part, and everything made so far forms a single continuous project. The watch order is the release order, and the only real question is whether you trust it.

The short answer

Watch the parts in order, starting with the 2012 series. Each part follows a different generation of the same family, which is why the cast resets and the tone moves: that is the format working, not a discontinuity to be survived. Six parts are fully animated, and a seventh is airing now.

• Part 1, Phantom Blood: the 2012 series, episodes 1 to 9. Victorian England, a stone mask, and the origin of a century-long family feud.
• Part 2, Battle Tendency: the rest of the 2012 series. The 1930s, now with more archaeology and considerably more swagger.
• Part 3, Stardust Crusaders: 48 episodes across two seasons, 2014 to 2015. A road trip to Egypt that introduced the stand mechanic the rest of the franchise runs on.
• Part 4, Diamond is Unbreakable: 39 episodes, 2016. A serial killer hiding in a small town, and the part fans mean when they say the series works at street level.
• Part 5, Golden Wind: 39 episodes, 2018 to 2019. Gangsters, Italy, and the most divisive ending among the six.
• Part 6, Stone Ocean: 38 episodes, released by Netflix in three batches: December 2021, September 2022 and December 2022. A prison break with the highest ceiling and the most argued-about finale in the animated saga.

Can you skip to Part 3?

This is the advice most often given, and this page is against it. The reasoning behind it is usually that Part 3 introduces stands, the power system everything afterwards uses, so the earlier material must be skippable setup. What the skip costs is the actual point of the story: the Joestar family's feud with Dio begins in Part 1 and Part 2 builds the lineage that makes Part 3's inheritance mean something. Part 1 is nine episodes. Watching them removes the single most common complaint about Part 3, which is that its villain arrives under-explained. He does not, if you were there.

The older adaptations

Before 2012 there was an OVA adaptation of Part 3 produced through the nineties and early 2000s, and a Phantom Blood film from 2007 that is genuinely hard to see. Neither is an entry point. They are period pieces about the franchise itself, worth seeking out after the modern series, the way black-and-white films reward people who already love the genre rather than people deciding whether to try it.

Steel Ball Run changes the rules, on purpose

Part 7 is not a continuation. It restarts the continuity in a new universe with new rules, which Araki wrote after concluding that six connected parts had taken the story where he wanted it to go. For a viewer, this is good news twice over. First, Parts 1 through 6 form a complete saga with an ending; you can finish Stone Ocean and stand somewhere real. Second, the next part is arriving live: the Steel Ball Run anime debuted its first stage on Netflix on 19 March 2026, and as of this writing its second stage begins streaming weekly on 25 September 2026. Finish the first six parts at your own pace and the seventh is waiting, restarted and ready, exactly as its author intended.