On many forums I've seen recommendations of Steel Ball Run as an "Absolutely amazing manga", "easily the best Jojos and epitomising everything about that 'style' of comic", and "From the art to story 10/10. Best thing i've ever read". After finishing it, I honestly can't say I see its appeal. The characters were barely fleshed out and quite boring, the fighting frequently was decided on pure "luck", rather than fighting strength or strategy, and the story was painfully plain.

The story - Coming in, I wasn't expecting a narrative masterpiece, but I was expecting a compelling story. I was very disappointed. There really isn't any depth to it other than "I want to complete the race first", or "I want to assemble the corpse". The corpse could've been a very interesting part of the story - but besides it being an object that everybody wants, and some small abilities, it was hardly touched upon. There was almost non-stop fighting, and bc of that really wasn't much of a story. It was basically a stereotypical shounen way of handling stories.

Fighting - There were a couple - 3 or 4 fights that were decided by luck, which left a very bad taste in my mouth. Are real-life fights decided by luck? Sure. But the author makes a big point of "luck" being a main reason why the main character wins some fights, which I cannot fathom why. The bad guy does everything right - but because xxxxx happened just at the right time, the main character wins! Once would have been cute. when it happens more than a few times, it starts getting frustrating. I don't know why the author glorifies plot armor, but it made me lose a lot of emotional attachment to fights and characters.
Also frequently in fights, I would notice that powers are VERY inconsistent - while a random character that gets hit by ability X would instantly blow apart, when it hits the main character, they were given almost 10 seconds - to talk it out, figure out a strategy, and then execute it to get to safety. I noticed this happening in almost every single fight. The amount of plot armor in this manga was ridiculous.

Character - After 22 volumes, I had nearly no emotional attachment to a single one of the characters. I think this is due to the manga being absolutely dominated by fighting. When there is no flashback scene or racing going on, the characters are most definitely fighting, leading to close to no exploration of the character's personalities or character. I honestly think the manga absolutely dropped the ball in this regard, there were some painful and not-showing-at-all moments where one character would say a "gag", but besides that there really wasn't any interesting shows of personalities. Most of them felt like cookie cutter good guys that were just on different sides.
Each bad guy was given a brief exposition of why he wasn't really "bad", then was thrust toward the main characters to get beat.

Overall this manga felt like a mediocre shounen. No interesting characters, no emotional attachment, no interesting story, just tons of fighting with chunk of them being decided by plot armor. Wouldn't really recommend.