Playing My Hero Academia: All’s Justice highlights one big thing for me: I really need to catch up and watch the anime. I think I’m at least three seasons behind now, and the eighth and final season is about to air in just over a month, but on top of all that, there’s a new series-capping game coming with My Hero Academia: All’s Justice.
Just as with the previous games, this is a 3v3 3D arena battler, but with the jump to the final season, we have a roster stuffed full of characters who’ve now reached maturity and levelled up all their abilities. Where Shoto was a rough around the edged glass cannon at the start of the series – for reasons that were quickly revealed – he’s now mastered the powers of One For All, able to call upon more layers of inherited abilities than before.
One of the main draws here will naturally be playing through the story mode and reliving the various staged battles between heroes and villains depicted in the Final War arc of the manga and anime, but then there’s also just all the wish-fulfilment and fun of creating distinctly mixed up fighting trios and pitting them head to head. I stuck with the good vs. bad divide, and had a lot of fun with with the baddies, who definitely had the feel of being more powerful.
Combat revolves around four core actions, with a locked-on target combo, a guard and counter-attack, and an unblockable attack to break through a stern defence. Being able to dash and get out of the way of an attack is key, but so too is being able to quickly swap characters and resume the fight with a different set of powers and abilities. Bakugo’s explosive fists are better at short range, while Todoroki’s mixed fire and ice give him enhanced movement and a bit more range, so you could adjust to a rival’s tactics. Of course, if one of your fighters is knocked out, then your options become a bit more limited!
New for this game is the Rising meter. This builds up as you fight, eventually filling a meter until you can trigger it and boost the power of your character with increased attack power, movement speed and recovery speed – it’s a pretty big bump, and it’s automatically granted to you when reduced to your last character, which is nice.
And then there’s the Plus Ultra abilities, which can be used to trigger a Plus Ultra Combo and bring your full squad in for a devastating combo attack of character switching.
While there’s no doubt going to be a lot of returning players diving into All’s Justice, work has been put in to try and make this more accessible with a new single-button auto-combo to take off some of the load while trying to keep pace with the battling. It’s definitely a bit of a help, given how difficult it is just to maintain distance and positioning sometimes, but it’s intended as just a stepping stone up to the regular control scheme.
All-in-all, this feels like a solid evolution of the One’s Justice games and should be a great way to wrap up the series in video game form, adding a few gameplay tweaks and with a smidgeon of added accessibility. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go and figure out where I got up to in the anime…
