A Tokyo jail cell, fluorescent lights, and a teenager who refuses to leave. Jotaro Kujo, seventeen, did not rob anyone. He did not start a fight. He simply sat down in his cell, pulled his cap low over his eyes, and told his mother he is possessed by an evil spirit. The guards are terrified of him. His grandfather, Joseph Joestar, flies in from New York with an answer Jotaro does not want: the evil spirit is not a curse. It is a Stand — a psychic manifestation of his fighting will, a humanoid power that moves at the speed of a bullet and can flick a grown man through a wall. Jotaro names it Star Platinum.

The Stand was unlocked for a reason. A coffin has been pulled from the Atlantic, and inside it is Dio — still alive, still Jonathan Joestar's stolen body stitched to his own severed head, one hundred years of submerged hatred finally awake. Dio's awakening sparks Stand abilities across the Joestar bloodline, but it also triggers a countdown he himself does not intend: Holly Kujo, Jotaro's mother, has developed a Stand of her own, and her gentle soul has no hope of controlling it. Her body is killing itself from the inside. The only cure is to destroy Dio before her Stand consumes her entirely. They have fifty days.

Jotaro, Joseph, an Egyptian fortune teller named Avdol, a French swordsman named Polnareff, and a Japanese schoolmate named Kakyoin who was briefly Dio's brainwashed slave — these five men set out from Japan on a cursed road trip toward Cairo. Every city holds a new assassin. Every Stand is a puzzle of lethal weirdness: a gun that fires bullets of living flesh, a shadow that devours people in the dark, a ship that is actually a giant orangutan. And at the end of the desert, Dio waits with The World — a Stand Jotaro understands too late can stop time itself.

Also known as: Stardust Crusaders, スターダストクルセイダース, Sutādasuto Kuruseidāsu.