Project Justice's fighting system is lifted from the original
Rival Schools, with some notable changes. The game continues to be a team fighter, but has teams of three characters instead of two. This allows another Team-Up attack to be used in a fight, but also adds a new type of attack, the Party-Up, initiated by pressing any three attack buttons. The Party-Up is a three-person attack that varies based on what school the character initiating the attack is from. The additional partner also allows players to cancel an opponent's Team-Up Special by inputting a Team-Up command of their own. This initiates a short fighting sequence between one character from each team. If the person initiating the sequence gets the first successful hit in during the sequence before time runs out, the Team-Up they are caught in will be canceled, and the game switches back to the main fight; if the opposing player gets the first hit or time runs out, the Team-Up continues as usual. Additionally, the "vigor" meter in
Project Justice is limited to 5 levels (down from 9 in
Rival Schools), with Party-Ups requiring all 5 levels, Team-Ups continuing to cost two levels, and any attempts (successful or not) to cancel a Team-Up costing one level. Also carrying over from the first game, the Dreamcast port of
Project Justice in Japan includes a character creation mode that allows a player to create their own fighters who can be used in all modes except for single-player. However, the character creation in
Project Justice is packaged as a board game, taking place during an inter-school festival, rather than a date sim game like in
Rival Schools. As with School Life Mode in the original
Rival Schools, though, this boardgame is not included in non-Japanese ports of
Project Justice due to the amount of time it would take to translate the mode. Instead, several unlockable sub-characters were included in these ports, built from the character creation parts in the Japanese version. All of the playable characters from the previous
Rival Schools game return, with the exception of Raizo Imawano and guest character
Sakura Kasugano, though the former appears as a
non-player character in the game's Story Mode. Five new characters are introduced, along with alternate versions of a few existing characters.
Style As in the original game many of the characters use their chosen field of academic or sporting excellence as a fighting style. As a result, special moves - in particular the Two-Person team up moves - tend to have a surreal edge, with methods to injure your opponent ranging from: forcing them to take part in an impromptu bout of synchronised swimming (on dry land) (if Nagare is in your team); confusing them by taking photographs of them in rapid succession during an interview for the school newspaper (if Ran is in your team), or even berating them so severely that they fall unconscious out of shame.
Project Justice's
single player mode was structured differently from its predecessor. While
Rival Schools only plays a story if characters from the same school were selected, the game instead has separate
Story and
Free modes. • In
Story Mode, players select a portion of story grouped by school and play through a rigid storyline with a limited group of 2 to 6 characters that the player can choose from for each fight. Like the original game, each fight in story mode is accompanied with
2D cut scenes that advance the story. In some stories, the plot will branch out depending on the results of certain fights or decisions made by the player, changing the fights that the player faces. After fighting the
boss of the game, an ending for the school's story is shown. • In
Free Mode, players select a team of three characters and fight random teams of opponents until getting to fight the boss, similar to selecting two characters from different schools in
Rival Schools. After defeating the boss, the player is shown a screen where the game rates the performance of player, and gives them a ranking named after a character from the game. ==Plot==