Review – My Hero Academia: All’s Justice

arrives with an immense responsibility that few licensed games carry, needing to go beyond just another chapter, to also be Byking’s attempt to transform the closure of one of the most important anime of the last decade into a playable epic.

The new 3D arena fighter embraces the spectacle of 3v3 battles and explores what the franchise has to offer most in the work created by Kohei Horikoshi, with the final and most powerful versions of heroes and villains, as well as a pack of modes to go beyond versus and give the feeling of living in that little world as a hero student. In the end, All’s Justice is that game that you turn on to relive the Final War with a super-production look and, at the same time, be able to try out absurd combinations that the anime didn’t provide, without having to stick to just the competitive mode.

The goodbye the franchise deserved

For those who haven’t noticed or missed the ending of the anime, the narrative focus of My Hero Academia: All’s Justice is on exploring the arc of the Final War, with a focus that focuses on the major confrontations and dramatic turns that define the ending of the work. Story Mode sells this promise through a new perspective and uses a more cinematic approach to weave moments such as, for example, Bakugo’s stance against All For One and Deku’s final fight, in which justice and redemption become the emotional center of the conflict. For those who followed the anime, the feeling is of revisiting familiar scenes, now with a different rhythm, after all, Bandai Namco was concerned with changing part of the contemplation by putting the viewer in control. For those who arrive without having seen everything, the game takes care to provide context, but it doesn’t hide that it was designed as a celebration for the fans, so it assumes that you know what happened to all those characters, the reason for all that rivalry and the size of the threat at stake.

The trick created by Byking is what happens outside of the revived scenes when bringing the Team Mission mode with the mission of creating the routine of Class 1 A, with missions on an exclusive map, progression and a “what” of Persona, even if simplified, inserting us into the day-to-day life of a hero, bringing the entire cast as a team. This mode, as it is based on an original scenario created exclusively for the game, works as a fun respite from the chaos and emotions that the main story carries, in addition to unlocking the Battle Archive, for you to revisit iconic fights from the past, and the Hero’s Diary, which promises never-before-seen moments from the characters. The developers created an intelligent way to escape the repetition of battles for those who want to unlock new content, with a structure that creates this sensation of trail for those who quickly get bored with online or local versus, and helps justify the game as a complete package, not just another anime arena fighter that you abandon as soon as you see all the scenes in the main story.

After the two games of My Hero One’s Justice and My Hero Ultra Rumble, Bandai Namco was concerned with launching something that goes beyond just another game of this type, making My Hero Academia: All’s Justice refine its battle system, listening to the community and fans, relying on the mechanics of Rising and Quirk. The first, in a mix of risk and reward, you increase attack power, movement speed and even improve your Quirks, making fights gain very interesting peaks of intensity. The famous Quirks, known in the series as Kosei, appear during combats so you can use these skills to combine and mix your team’s Quirks in 3v3 to create tactical synergies.

The core continues to be putting together a trio with synergy, because the exchange of characters in the middle of combos and the possibility of combining chain actions is what justifies this combat in trios. When this comes together, the fight takes on the show that every shonen fan expects, with sudden turns, constant pressure and room for creativity. At the same time, like every arena fighter, there is a delicate balance between accessibility and depth, meaning that My Hero Academia: All’s Justice seeks to be easy while at the same time needing to reward those who dedicate themselves to the point of developing movement reading, assist timing and understanding each Quirk, showing that Byking managed to balance the learning curve so that the game doesn’t just become mashing buttons to run, with colorful explosions all around and unlocking beautiful scenes. Perhaps it is far from being a competitive game at the level of being in an EVO of life, but the level design and character balancing choices, with Rising and Quirk allowing strategic variety, allow you to think about the choice of characters through each role to avoid the shallowness of just choosing your three favorite characters.

It is inevitable that we compare My Hero Academia: All’s Justice to previous titles, but this time we have a more noticeable evolution and an even greater scope. Before, the feeling was of revisiting arcs and characters in successive steps, always with the progression that the franchise followed in the anime and the game following behind. In this new chapter of the franchise, perhaps because it is the final game, everything revolves around the final versions that the characters have reached, both heroes and villains, with a cast that offers the greatest experience in the series to date, so in the background you have more content that explores this trajectory to enhance the peak of power of the characters.

Justice, redemption and the last confrontation

The presence of combat modes with their variations, online and local, go further with the Team Mission and the logic of unlocking more content creating a different cadence than the simple story and versus sequence, and this helps the desire to continue playing to live with these characters once again. Unfortunately, there is no way to free yourself from the constraints and limitations of the arena fighter genre and 3v3 combat, so don’t expect a complete reinvention from Byking, which consolidates its identity just as CyberConnect2 did with Naruto, however the difference is that My Hero Academia: All’s Justice is concerned with creating its content with more meaning, after all, the context of the ending calls for all the exaggerations that an arena combat can deliver.

Proof of Bandai Namco’s concern is in the art direction, in which All’s Justice understands that My Hero Academia has always been about the contrast between everyday school life and the monumental chaos of battles, and tries to translate this with flashy arenas, spectacular visual effects and a staging that values ​​emotional impact, even when the screen becomes a festival of colors. The cinematic side of the story mode helps to sell this scale and emotion, while the secondary modes function as a showcase for the characters, with space for smaller moments that recall the reasons for Turma 1 A to be so charismatic and win over a legion of fans.

The soundtrack fulfills the role expected from an anime game with big fights, pushing adrenaline, marking climaxes and keeping the energy high without tiring, and, even when you get tired of playing, it serves as fuel to make you miss reliving the grandeur of the confrontations, including in matches that may seem repetitive to those who are further away from this fandom. Fans will certainly recognize much of the original work and will be transported into the game during this nostalgic trip for those who have followed the anime for all these years.

In the end, what remains is the impression of a game made to close the door with a lot of noise, celebrating the franchise at its peak and offering a robust package for fans, despite the natural limitations of the arena fighter format. If you’ve followed the journey so far, My Hero Academia: All’s Justice is a goodbye that tries to be worthy of the size that the franchise has managed to achieve and will certainly leave a void that can be filled with this game.