One Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows (PS4)

In the manga and anime series One Punch Man, the core idea is that no matter how tough someone might be, the hero Saitama can easily defeat them in battle with just one punch. While this works well for a superhero comedy that subverts typical storytelling conventions, its a bit difficult to imagine how this could translate to a 3D fighting game. The source material already found a way around its central premise though, the plot often focusing in on the battles between members of the supporting cast to still provide some more elaborate action even though you know it might end with a single blow once Saitama shows up. One Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows goes that route as well, the title character also an abnormality in regards to how its heroes and villains normally fight.

 

In the world of One Punch Man, an organization known as the Hero Association has been established to help deal with the fairly regular monster attacks that plague its cities. Members of the association are ranked to help with determining the right heroes to send depending on the perceived threat level of a monster, and One Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows sees the player starting as a fledgling hero of their own who has just been admitted as a member of the lowest rank, Class C. The game’s story mode has the player working their way up through the ranks, responding to calls at the Hero Association HQ and its branch offices to assist with monster attacks or stopping criminals. As you start rising in renown, you’ll start to run into other recognizable heroes from the source material. You’ll even get the chance to play as them or other newly invented heroes in battle, because while fights are one-on-one, back up can arrive and you can swap out your current fighter for those arrivals to take over if you wish.

Climbing up the ranks starts off as a mildly satisfying string of battles as you start experimenting with the battle system and facing off with consistently new foes. The hero you create can utilize a small range of different styles and gradually unlocks more as you meet certain characters and progress in the story. You can fight with your fists in a power focused arrangement, go for a more speedy combat style, tap into psychic powers that can better handle ranged combat, and there are even multiple different types of robotic and weapon-focused fighting styles. Feeling your way through these new options and encountering characters who help introduce them or their own specific twist to them make the early discovery in the story feel like it has some forward momentum, but somewhere around B Rank it starts to feel less and less like the game has anything new left to show you despite there being a good deal left to do. This partly comes down to the types of monsters you face in combat, many of the less important heroes and villains constructed using the same decent but still somewhat limited character creator for their designs. The game might whip together a decent looking kappa or alien monster, but then it keeps throwing horse-head monsters at you many times in a row and the missions start to feel more like the busywork they often are. Most fights will have you pop into a battle you’re probably not going to struggle with that has no interesting conditions applied to it, so mowing down monsters starts to become rather rote, especially if you’re done expl0ring the tasting menu of fighting styles on offer. The AI seems to struggle at times too, sometimes running around with no clear purpose, and even when they’re using a fighting style with no possible long range options they might just scramble around the other side of the arena for a bit before remembering to get back into the battle.

 

There is still a little room for the main adventure to avoid stagnation, especially if you indulge in the extra quests around the small city hub area. Some have amusing premises like investigating supposed occult activity that is never what it seems, but it’s often the ones involving recognizable characters from One Punch Man that feel more fully realized. The S-Class Hero Silverbang will occasionally test your grit in a battle where you need to avoid being trounced by his incredible strength while landing enough hits to impress him, and the top B-Class Hero Hellish Blizzard will let you join her Blizzard Bunch where a group of weaker heroes manage to punch above their weight class by working together. Not every fight is going to have a strong premise, sometimes it’s just a way to have you and that hero fight together against a gang of monsters, but the little bits of story and personality do make these worth seeking out if you need a break from the monotony of Hero Association missions.

 

There is a true story line divided into eleven chapters in One Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows, the player often needing to have a certain amount of points earned through the missions to participate in these important plot moments. However, while much of your work in this game is building up your own legend and strengthening your bonds with other heroes, the story chapters are still very much Saitama’s show and it feels quite at odds with how the rest of the game unfolds. The story chapters follow the events of the manga and anime a little too closely, refusing to let Saitama stand aside much of the time so a few too many involve your created character coming across the kind of overblown untouchable villain that no other hero could possibly handle and futilely smacking them around until the game cuts to a cutscene of Saitama showing up. Since Saitama is both invincible and able to immediately defeat his foe the moment he hits them, this means all the build-up does end up going to waste as the fight will end with no trouble whatsoever once he’s involved. This does, admittedly, come off as humorous the first few times it happens, but it starts feeling like a waste that you don’t even get to have a decent fight with a powerful monster or villain before this punchline comes to wrap things up. Many major foes are available in the competitive multiplayer fights and in a rematch mission where you can at least fight them on your own. You can still get some story elements that focus in on characters like the somewhat weak Mumen Rider proving his determination by standing against a foe he has no hope against, but from a gameplay perspective, it grows tedious to have to play out these fights that feel empty of meaning.

Perhaps if the battle system was stronger, One Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows could have sustained its repetitive mission structure longer, but the attack options a single character has access to feel rather limited. You have a standard combo of strikes you can utilize with the square button, and sometimes pressing a single direction, holding the button, or throwing in some triangle attacks instead will shift up the exact attacks you execute. There are some attacks with clear purpose like ones that will knock the foe up into the air or intercept someone jumping in, but your attack strings usually will end up going down the same path provided the opponent isn’t guarding. You land your combo, sometimes extending it if you find a really good mix of moves, and then send the opponent flying across the 3D battle arena, where they take some time to get back on their feet. Battles often boil down to one person getting smacked away, both players moving in, and then finding out who is going to be sent flying next. Things drag on even more when you factor in some performance issues, the game slowing down not only during specific elaborate attacks but also even during the normal city navigation at times. The battle system is not bereft of strategy, especially with certain battle types having extra options like projectiles or moves that only hit at a certain distance, and there is a customization element in terms of which Killer Moves you set.

 

For the most part, the cast of One Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows will utilize the same battle styles the custom characters pull from but their specific Killer Moves are locked in for their character. Killer Moves require the player to use up energy stocks that gradually replenish during battle or can be earned more quickly by knocking your opponent around, Killer Moves often hitting hard or having special effects. Child Emperor can use his mechanical backpack to leave a part of the ground on fire, Tanktop Master can unleash a powerful grab that can break through guards, and characters like Metal Bat pack moves that briefly increase their strength to make them more formidable. The stock cost is meant to balance them out even though you can charge up some with a simple button combo, this especially easy to do while your foe is on the ground and not able to stand up yet. Still, it doesn’t exactly disrupt the equilibrium since both sides have this option and the only incredibly powerful Killer Move would actually be your Super Killer Move that requires first activating your limited time enhanced strength super mode and then landing a specific attack that can be guarded or evaded. If battles flowed better with characters not constantly being flung around the battlefield, these do feel like decent fundamentals and there are definitely going to be battles you can squeeze an interesting challenge out of, but it also makes other fights drag on as your simple attack options don’t require much variation to effectively handle the opposition and you need to keep waiting for a foe to be vulnerable again.

 

The hero arrival system does add an intriguing element to battles where it appears. If you lose before your back-up arrives, you have lost the entire fight, but once they do make it to the battle, they’ll be waiting in the wings for you to swap in either when you wish to use them or when you lose one of your fighters. There is thus some reward for aggression in two different ways. A player is able to invalidate the rest of an opponent’s team by taking out their leader before the support can arrive, but even in the short team you can land a good combo on the opposition and the time it takes for your next back-up hero to show up will be reduced some. Saitama’s strength is often limited in multiplayer this way, the invincible hero taking his sweet time to arrive and he must always be placed at the back of your team of three to make it even less likely he’ll have a chance to drop by and resolve things. You can turn Saitama off in online multiplayer in case you want to avoid people stalling as they wait for him to arrive. Unfortunately, stalling is often a pretty strong tactic in general whether it comes to story missions where you need to survive for a while or waiting for helpful events to happen. Not only might backup arrive, but items will be dropped into the arena by drone, most of these usually brief boosts to strength or defense but the 50% heal can quickly invert the battle. Similarly, random events can happen, some of them having the potential to be devastating. A meteor shower can sometimes wipe out a character on its own if the meteors land right, but more often than not it will be something smaller that leads to only a small shake-up like when the Ground Dragon tries to snag people from underground and hold them in place for some damage, the dirt effects as it digs even meaning it’s not too hard to avoid. There is an alert when one is about to happen and you won’t always have full details on what’s coming, so the event system does have some room to be an amusing disruption that helps to add a little a variety to a battle system that could use more of it.

THE VERDICT: One Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows starts off well, the idea of building up your own hero supported with some decent customization options and the interactions with other heroes often provide some amusing and faithful opportunities to interact with characters from the series. Over time the many similar missions wear you down, and with most fights already not asking for much beyond your standard light combo and a few Killer Moves thrown in for surges of damage, it becomes more tedious to press forward even if you’re just trying to clear the story to earn all the unlockable fighters. That story unfortunately crumples under its focus on the invincible Saitama robbing it of challenging fights too, so you’re somewhat denied your own personal hero narrative, given weak battles for the adapted plot, and the multiplayer combat feels lean despite a few nifty systems like the hero arrivals and events that try to spice them up. A One Punch Man fan might better appreciate the combat or chance to interact with familiar faces, but it feels like the game could have been structured better to provide both thrilling battles and deliberate anticlimax punchlines.

 

And so, I give One Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows for PlayStation 4…

A BAD rating. One Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows would have likely been better off focusing in on the idea of you being an up-and-coming member of the Hero Association in the world of One Punch Man rather than trying to mix in the course of events from the source material to such underwhelming results. It can’t add as much of the humor or character work as the manga and anime since it doesn’t want to spend too much time in cutscenes, and while it does work hard enough within its own context so someone unfamiliar with series could treat it almost as an original work, you still get that empty feeling when you’re going to face a novel foe only to know your actions likely aren’t going to be too important. If the enemy was giving it their all and you had a battle system that let you fight strategically, perhaps a lead-in where you both feel the enemy’s strength but need to effectively keep them at bay would make Saitama showing up satisfying instead of just a way to wrap-up a section focused more on building up a character who isn’t even at the center of the broader story it’s telling. Those side quests and hero interactions that do have stronger premises or unique battle types feel like they provide much better ways to interact with this world and One Punch Man’s cast to the point it wouldn’t feel like you’re missing much if you didn’t have to step outside this game’s invented story to see Saitama kill that monster he killed in canon, but gussying up other elements like having a more layered battle system feels like it would still be needed to stave off some of the repetition inherent in the mission system. There are a lot of background systems like buying skills to gain certain edges in combat and you can even acquire plenty of costumes and even furniture for your apartment, but heading off to fight monsters as hero does start to feel like work sometimes so it’s likely your interest will wane in the extra touches since they all tie back to battering bland monsters. Another attack button to add some more options to a fight and some increased speed so people aren’t spending so long on the ground could add some more life to the experience, but at least some ideas like the hero arrival system means a One Punch Man fan might be able to ride the moments that work long enough to get what they want out of a game based on the series.

 

One Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows is perhaps going to be best remembered for its unusual nomination for the 2020 Game Awards, seemingly more because the Best Fighting Game category didn’t have enough potential nominees of note to make a decent ballot otherwise. It certainly doesn’t feel like it deserves consideration for such an accolade, but it’s not so awful that it feels absolutely ridiculous anyone would like it. It represents the world of One Punch Man well, even to a fault when it comes to its story chapters, and rising the ranks as a custom hero starts off as a promising concept before it loses steam a bit too early on. It could have almost worked as something like a brawler that just happens to control like a fighting game in terms of combos and battle format, but it would need more substantial action to pull such a premise off. Saying that One Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows’s battles are as simple as Saitama’s preferred fighting style might feel a little pithy, but One Punch Man can construct decent battles in its source material that don’t just end in a single blow. While it’s impressively faithful in many other ways, One Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows can’t quite hit that same sweet spot in providing moments of tense combat and amusing simplicity.