The popular anime My Hero Academia (Boku no Hero Academia) has an upcoming 3D-fighting game releasing in 2018 called My Hero One’s Justice. I was lucky enough to get a hands-on demo during my time at E3 2018. Being a fan of anime myself, I was interested to see how the fanbase would react to play this game. It seems the answer was action, action and more action, with a nice touch of anime-styled graphics sprinkled on top.
I went into the demo of the game knowing nothing about it, and was surprised in many ways. The first surprise was just how many characters were playable in the demo. There was a large selection of well-known characters from My Hero Academia that I could choose from, both good and evil. After choosing to play as Uraraka Ochako, also known as Uravity, I was able to choose two allies that would help me during battle. I decided to run the classic good vs evil scenario to fit in with the anime’s theme. Once the character introductions started playing, I noticed just how individual the art style and gameplay was. Very rarely do you find games that are able to accurately capture their animated counterparts not only in style but feel. I would say that My Hero One’s Justice achieved this throughout my various demos. The addition of stages set from scenes in the anime was a nice touch.
The gameplay, although different and somewhat unique, did add some problems though. Usually, when playing games, players will use their previous experience of the same genre to help us find their way through the basics. My Hero One’s Justice plays quite differently from any fighter I’ve played before. The first difference being that it was a 3v3 match in which all characters were not equally involved. The main character on your team is the one the player uses, while the other two are used more like assists than additional characters. The attacks used by the character assists are the same as if a player was switching in and using their special character-based attacks. These special character attacks are named “Querk Abilities”.
While playing, I was able to get to grips with the basic uses of my chosen characters’ Querk Abilities, allowing me to take out the enemy team and win the game. Strangely enough, after trying out multiple characters across multiple games, I understood the game less and less. Each character has three Querk Abilities and three “Plus Ultra Attacks”, equalling six unique attacks per character. Combine those six attacks with the various team mashups available and it soon became obvious that I was not going to understand this game completely just from a few 3 vs. 3 matches. My Hero One’s Justice clearly requires a hefty knowledge of the characters and combinations to mast all it has to offer, which is a great thing for the competitive scene.
While it will require a lot of time and effort to master, it does offer tons of replayability. No matter how many games I played, each felt different and unique, ensuring I was learning through experience and not just through random button presses. Learning through the character choices, partner choices, ability choices, and stage choices allows for various levels of skills and makes the gameplay multilayered. This multilayered gameplay ensures fun and challenges for hours on end as you try to beat your opponents in different ways and beat your previous scores versus certain team setups.
My Hero One’s Justice arrives October 2018 for the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and Steam.
