My Hero One’s Justice (PS4)

Video games that aim to adapt an anime or manga sometimes end up running into the issue where their story has to stop at an unusual spot. This is somewhat understandable, if the source material isn’t finished, there’s nothing there to draw from to wrap up the game with. The fighting game My Hero One’s Justice was released well before My Hero Academia came to a close, but it was fortunate enough to be able to cut off its adventure at the appropriately high stakes battle between the number one hero All Might and the legendarily powerful power-stealing villain All for One. The game is so proud it can make that its climax it opens with a flash forward to that confrontation, but it’s actually where this 3D arena fighter’s story begins that feels truly unusual, skipping past almost all of the actual time spent at the hero academy and plopping the plot down at a somewhat strange starting point.

My Hero Academia itself is a story about the majority of people on Earth manifesting superpowers that are referred to as their Quirks. While some live normal lives despite this, people with more flexible or useful Quirks seek to use them to aid society as heroes or hurt others for their own gain as villains. My Hero Academia focuses in on a school dedicated to raising the most promising candidates for future heroes at the same time a League of Villains is established to start pushing back against crime-fighting efforts. Much of the early plot focuses on Deku as he goes from a quirkless boy to one granted the powers of All Might, that incredible strength hard to harness but Deku shows incredible potential. My Hero One’s Justice elects to skip past much of his early battles and struggles as well as early encounters against the League, the start actually being when he interns under the elderly hero Gran Torino. While a good fit for its tutorials, the following conflict with the Hero Killer does feel a bit strange when his moralizing about heroes losing their way is done absent of context, My Hero One’s Justice really relying on you to have previous knowledge of the source material to properly place its cutscenes and dialogue as something meaningful.

My Hero One’s Justice does have a fairly substantial story mode with many fights to participate in, but what makes it efforts to adapt events a bit odder is it at once feels like it expects you to essentially recognize what’s going on from the manga or anime but tries to hide parts it doesn’t wish to adapt. My Hero One’s Justice does have a pretty decent roster for the stretch of the story it adapts, 20 characters in total with the only egregious admissions being that the mutated Nomu monsters are available to fight but not play as and maybe the acid-flinging hero Mina Ashido. However, the story seems rather uneasy about referencing characters who aren’t playable. Despite one of the League of Villains’s attacks involving the use of Twice’s ability to clone people, it tries to avoid mentioning him directly and when it does it isn’t even that clear what his power is from game materials alone. In the same event, one portion features a character named Aoyama firing a powerful laser blast to disrupt the villains, but the game wants to play this off as some mysterious laser of unknown origin. One of the weirder cases though involves the Hero Killer Stain attacking the speedster Iida. The framing of the event in the source material involves Iida swooping in as the Hero Killer is about to kill minor character Native, but despite using stills and altered images from the anime, My Hero One’s Justice goes out of its way to avoid acknowledging or showing that set-up save for the unusual oversight that Stain mentions he was trying to kill two heroes before Deku shows up to save Iida and the unseen Native.

The story mode engages in some sloppy and strange summarizing to be sure, but it does handle its battle structure a bit better than the source material would have allowed if it was stringently followed. With certain arcs of My Hero Academia focusing on a particular character or villain, it could be quite easy to have multiple battles in a row where you only play as one character over and over again, and My Hero One’s Justice doesn’t completely avoid this. However, it does sprinkle in some “What If” battles to give you time with underemphasized characters on top of some missions where you can pick from a small set of characters for the fight. What it maybe doesn’t handle so well is framing some of the fights. Story mode features one round battles you need to win to move on, but in the context of the plot, you are sometimes fighting battles your character not only loses, but loses soundly. It doesn’t matter if you defeat the opponent without taking a hit, in the cutscene your character is the one who is almost dead or might even comment on how apparently that beatdown was actually them failing to put even a scratch on their foe. It does lead to some amusing discrepancies between the gameplay and plot, but this might also be partly to blame on the game adapting both the Hero and Villain side of the story. You will get to play as the winner of each battle technically, but whether you’re on the Hero path or the unlockable Villain path will determine whether the results of the fight really line up with what goes on in the story.

The battling itself in My Hero One’s Justice is very basic but also incredibly impressive when it comes to how it is visually realized. Individually, characters have very few unique moves, many additional ones technically existing as part of simple combos but they only exist within the chain of repeated button presses. Square unleashes typical opener attacks that can link together into an easy combo, but Triangle and Circle instead feature Quirk related attacks unique to your character. You can alter some attacks by leaping into the air to execute them or charge them, and characters have unique guard breaker attacks that usually then boil back down to mashing your basic attack should they work. There is some room to find ways to chain your moves properly, the game even offering two modes of play where Normal will make the same combos for you without much input while Manual lets you better explore how to link them together yourself to potentially make stronger or more situational mixes. My Hero One’s Justice is mostly about landing a big hit and then slipping into a typical punish combo, but there are also Plus Ultra super moves to build up to that deal heavy damage and often show off a character’s Quirk in a flashy scene.

Many of your attacks in My Hero One’s Justice are given incredible flourishes. Sparks fly, dust is kicked up, the air twists around a punch, and comic book style sound effect words appear to accentuate blows. It is very easy to get wrapped up in the impressive look of a move because of the colorful auras, incredible destruction, and other effects that work to make them feel powerful to land even when they’re not denting an opponent’s health bar all that much. Much of the cast at least feels appreciably different despite their limited range of moves as well. Creati’s ability to manifest matter leads to her being able to conjure different weapons with different basic combos, Eraser Head can briefly disable a character’s Quirk attacks should he land his own, and Shoto Todoroki has ice attacks that can freeze for good follow-ups with his fire moves. You are able to make choices in battle on how to approach, some characters like Dabi and Shigaraki able to command a space a bit, and while some characters like Tsuyu feel a little weak on their end of the power curve, generally characters don’t feel too powerful at least. The game will let you see All Might punch someone so hard into the air they can see the entirety of Japan and Shigaraki’s decay Quirk is used for some interesting visuals like causing the screen itself to crumble, but you can keep fighting after even such heavy blows and the strong stuff requires building up towards. You can even fight as a team where you can call in assists for occasional help, these good for breaking you free from a combo or harassing foes from multiple angles when they’re trying to avoid conflict.

The game’s AI is actually pretty conflict averse you’ll find. A lot of the time, game-controlled opponents really seem to overemphasize running around rather than engaging, to the point you can win some tough battles by letting them do so after you’ve dealt enough damage that you’re declared the winner after the round timer is up. There’s often a lot of room to run around in the game’s arenas, characters able to dash to quickly cover distance and when you attack you’ll at least be made to face your opponent so it’s more likely to hit. Moving around after the attack is launched can dodge it, and guarding is generally very useful too against all but the unblockables. You do have a guard meter that depletes if overused, but also combos being fairly cookie-cutter even in Manual means you can often guard until the apparent opening and then start your own attacks. Fights in My Hero One’s Justice end up becoming less rewarding because your small kit of options, while technically featuring unique attacks across the cast to match their powers, still boils down to a lot of the same strategies. Projectile characters might be able to play a bit differently, but most characters don’t have truly unique tricks like Quirk disabling or freezes so it’s about finding your opening for the same set of attacks over and over again. Some ideas do have promise, certain attacks giving you yellow armor that lets you push through incoming attacks to try and land yours, but then the game also has a poor wall battle system where play shifts perspective as characters start walking on walls, taxing a camera that already sometimes blocks the action or loses it in the spray of effects to its detriment.

Story mode won’t often push hard against you unless you care about trying to get high rankings, the game featuring a wide range of cosmetics to unlock that do meaningfully let you alter the appearance of the playable heroes and villains. However, the game does offer voice packs for purchase but only in unsubtitled Japanese. During scenes and some fights the game will subtitle dialogue, but then the character intros and end screens for every fight do not and even the menus feature a lot of chatter that remains untranslated. For more single player content with costume rewards there are the Mission Maps, these containing fights with special conditions like gradually healing foes or making some of your moves weaker, but you get to pick your characters for use, level them up through repeat runs, and even earn healing and boost items to make up for the fact a Mission Map must be cleared with the same heroes who do not heal otherwise. Multiplayer fights and online do exist to help you find smarter opponents than those found in Story and the sometimes harder Mission mode, as does Arcade where you just fight a few characters in a row, but multiplayer will give the game a bit more variety at least as people can better explore how to exploit their character’s small tool kit of moves. Yellow armor and unique powers can make this a bit more interesting when both sides are strategizing, but it doesn’t feel robust enough to keep pulling players back in for fight after fight because it’s often still set-ups to the same basic combos.

THE VERDICT: My Hero One’s Justice looks the part well, this adaptation of My Hero Academia really emphasizing making the Quirks look powerful and impressive, and the art style transitions the characters to 3D with near perfection. The story is a messier mix, trying to thin details where they are important and not always putting up an adequate fight to match the situation. The AI is generally pretty poor, but even should you face other skilled humans, the range of attacks per character feels a bit limited even when a few exhibit some interesting adaptations of their power. My Hero One’s Justice makes its battles look intense, but their limited depth means a lot of the time you’re mashing through the same few combos since they work well and there’s not many other options to spice up the flow of the fight.

And so, I give My Hero One’s Justice for PlayStation 4…

A BAD rating. My Hero One’s Justice almost nailed the presentation side of things at least, even though it seemed content to avoid the audio side of that by not even subtitling a good deal of the dialogue and writing a story that struggles to accommodate its odd range of focus. It’s very impressive to watch, the characters feel like they are hitting with incredible force, and since My Hero Academia is already sort of pitched as the Japanese take on American superheroes, it feels appropriate in some way for a fighting game to focus heavily on big hits as if they were the distinct attacks of a comic book panel. Fighting like you’re in a comic book does boil you down to key poses rather than clever mixes, although the game does funnily enough start praising longer combos as Clever or Genius even when you’re just mashing Square for an auto-combo that happens to hit a lot. There is definitely room within the system it has created for some exploration, characters who have attacks with unique effects can shift the battle a bit better than the range of ones who rely on hitting hard and often. When you can construct a lengthy attack chain it is satisfying, but there’s not too much room to mix up your moves unless you want to try something risky like powering through attacks with yellow armor in the hopes of a quick opening. The AI running around so much isn’t actually the worst strategy if done at the right times, it is just a bit overzealous, but that movement is also good for leaving people vulnerable after they whiff an opener if used with more thought.

Generally, My Hero One’s Justice isn’t too difficult because of things like normal inputs and the limited range of moves to remember, and while characters like Uraraka with her gravity powers require some understanding to utilize, you’ll at least get the visual effects you’d expect from such a character fighting. It is, quite unsurprisingly, a game for the fans in that it’s showing the fans what they want rather than building something with enough complexity to work independent of its branding. Some people do just want to be All Might and execute some excessively powerful looking attacks, and they don’t care as much about the AI being the sandbag taking that. It’s not entirely lacking in potential for some exciting fights, and if you work to master a character it can be thrilling to win a round against another skilled player, but it also has the rough edges and narrowness that mean mostly you’re getting many fights that are truly plain if you don’t get tricked by the explosive effects. Despite enjoying My Hero Academia myself, once again it seems like an anime fighter wants players to like it because it’s based on something they love rather than contributing something of much value to that franchise, the game serving as merchandise first and a fighter second.