Steel Ball Run Episode 3: A Forgettable Early Villain Gets a Legendary Fight Scene

Steel Ball Run's 2nd Stage Episode 3 (Netflix, October 2) animates Gyro Zeppeli's fight against the Boomboom Family — minor hired-assassin antagonists from early in the Part 7 manga, whose Stand turns metal magnetic once it touches Gyro's blood. A Japanese reaction video built around an official clip of that fight drew 418 comments, and the overwhelming reaction was disbelief that a fight this minor got this much visual effort: the top comment (2,483 likes) simply says nobody expected a villain this forgettable to look this cool.

From there the thread splits between pure excitement about the choreography and a more specific argument — that the Boomboom Family's magnetism is a genuinely rough matchup for Gyro's steel balls, not just a style showcase — before turning into anticipation for the far more famous Ringo Oyanagi fight still to come. A smaller side-thread just enjoyed minor animation details and the voice cast.

Steel Ball Run — JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Part 7 — aired its 2nd Stage Episode 3, titled "The Desert-Born Outlaws," on Netflix this past Friday, and Warner Bros. Japan Anime's channel posted an official clip from the episode's fight scene. The Boomboom Family are minor antagonists from early in the Part 7 manga: a family of hired assassins sent after Gyro Zeppeli and Johnny Joestar, whose Stand power is a form of magnetism that activates on anything metal once it makes contact with Gyro's blood. In the manga, they're a brief obstacle on the way to bigger things, the kind of name most readers forget by the next chapter. They are not a fight the fandom usually brings up unprompted — which is exactly what set off a 418-comment thread arguing over how much style the staff poured into a fight nobody expected to care about.

It isn't purely a style argument, though. Part of what's fueling the surprise is that the fight itself is a genuinely rough matchup on paper, not just a showcase for the animators — the Boomboom Family's power is built specifically to counter the one tool Gyro always relies on.

From there, the thread does the thing JoJo fans always do once a minor fight impresses them: it immediately starts projecting forward to the fight everyone actually came to see.

Not every reply in the thread was about choreography and future hype, either. Some of it was just the usual small-detail spotting and praise that happens once an audience decides an episode earned its attention.

Three episodes into 2nd Stage, Steel Ball Run has apparently decided there's no such thing as a throwaway fight. For a family of hired goons the manga itself never built up as anything special, that's a strange kind of compliment — and with the genuinely iconic fights of the race, Ringo's chapters among them, still ahead of it, it's either very reassuring or very ominous for everyone involved in finishing this adaptation week by week. Either way, the comment section has already started counting down to the next one.