Review: My Hero Academia: All’s Justice - A Challenge Worthy of a Hero!

My Hero Academia: All’s Justice has all the right ingredients to be a thrilling farewell to an anime that showed the evolution of young people filled with fear, doubt, and hope into the world's greatest heroes. This game covers the Final War Arc in detail, with a sincere appreciation for the series and its main themes: courage, heroism, overcoming challenges, and much more. Its huge cast is surprisingly varied and includes practically everyone from the series, from main characters like Deku and All-Might to secondary characters like Gentle Criminal.

All's Justice also brought some much-needed improvements to the core combat mechanics, which, while still a bit strange, feels better and faster than before. Compared to games like Dragon Ball Sparking! Zero, the combat here is quite simple and easy to pick up.

Combine that with a new, exclusive free roam mode and plenty of fanservice, and All's Justice should easily be the best My Hero game. It still is, but there's a big problem. It's true that the bar isn't very high, as the two One's Justice games were only passable.

While All's Justice does a lot right, it has some serious balance issues that make getting through the single-player modes one of the most frustrating experiences you'll have in your entire gaming life. This problem ultimately becomes a major obstacle to making this game a farewell tribute to My Hero Academia and, unfortunately, prevents it from achieving the PLUS ULTRA score it deserved. Let's talk about My Hero Academia: All’s Justice and, if you have any questions, leave a comment.

The combat and story modes of All's Justice are a huge step forward from previous games, making the story the main attraction of All's Justice. If you're unfamiliar with the story of My Hero Academia, here's a brief summary:

In the world, everyone is born with some kind of power, ranging from powers like unleashing enormous explosions from their hands, having all the abilities of a frog, nullifying gravity, super speed, etc. Some are smaller, like moving small objects with their mind, but our protagonist, Izuku Midoriya, was born without any power. He was a big fan of All Might, the world's greatest hero, and wanted to be a hero too. But he had no powers.

After saving someone and demonstrating immense courage, All Might grants him powers, and he attends U.A. High School, where he meets various other characters such as Ochako Uraraka, Shoto Todoroki, Mirio Togata, and other young heroes. They become involved in cases with increasingly powerful and complex supervillains, culminating in an epic battle between Midoriya and All For One, the villain who steals and accumulates powers for himself.

All's Justice surprisingly delves into the final arc and allows you to play as multiple characters in almost all of its battles. However, it completely ignores the beginning of the story. If you're unfamiliar with it, you'll encounter something "already started" and be left wondering who's who and what's happening. Much of the story is told through stills and moving scenes from the anime, but the most important moments are recreated with beautiful cutscenes.

In the first few hours, the story mode is a great time. Not only does it capture the hopeful vibes characteristic of the series, but the combat mechanics have also received some notable improvements since One's Justice 2. Attacks have more weight, characters are generally faster and easier to maneuver, and there's a much quicker and easier flow to combos in each fight.

Even if the controls are still clunky, All's Justice is still very fun to play. The biggest strength of all, however, is the roster of over 50 characters, which has an impressive variety for an anime fighting game.

Let's face it, there's no point in boasting about having a roster of, let's say, 300 characters and having 50 Gokus, 30 Vegetas, 35 Gohans, 25 Trunks, and others who have a simple transformation and are sold to you as a new character.

Here, at most, Deku has a variant for each playstyle, Bakugo explodes the battlefield with a mix of close-range attacks and projectiles, Hanta Sero can set traps and be a major nuisance, and Armored All-Might is basically the mechanical Batman with tons of gadgets and tricks, and Uraraka uses her gravity manipulation powers to pull chunks of earth to use as battering rams.

Here's the game's biggest weakness. In the first half of All's Justice's campaign, the game is a fun homage and makes you feel like you're inside the anime, with the battles, the characters, and the feeling of combat that will truly change the world. But in the final chapters, the difficulty rises to a ridiculously unfair level.

Everyone you fight deals twice the damage you do, and the AI ​​is practically omniscient in how it neutralizes your every move, which gets even worse when you have to face more than one enemy at the same time!

Several of the story's most impactful scenes become frustrating due to how unnecessarily unfair the AI ​​is. Armored All-Might's great resistance against All For One should be an epic moment, but it becomes an exercise in patience because of the number of times you'll be hit by an unavoidable projectile and have to restart the fight.

And the final boss? That’ll be an even more frustrating challenge that will give you a "Detroit Smash" on your controller. You'll have to fight five rounds against a boss that can take you down in practically two hits, regardless of your defense, super armor, or anything else.

If you manage to get through those five rounds and still haven't destroyed your TV, you'll have to face an even more powerful form, with more HP and harder-to-avoid attacks. If you fail, you'll have to go through it all again and listen to the same inspiring dialogue (the first time. The rest will be skip, skip, skip) about making people smile and not giving up.

If you can get through this, there won't be a soulslike game you can't beat.

Team missions add some variety to the game, but also suffer from unfair AI. When you want to take a break from story mode (and you will), All's Justice also introduces a new mode called Team-Up Mission, which allows you to roam a virtual city, recruit heroes for your team and use their unique traversal abilities to get around (Midoriya uses a Spider-Man-like 'web', Uraraka uses gravity to make huge jumps, etc.), as well as perform small services to increase your hero ranking.

Of course, this will also give you coins to unlock new outfits, emojis, profile signatures, character voices, various poses, and a whole lot more that fans will love.

It's a welcome change of pace and gives All's Justice more content than just constant battles, although ultimately you'll still be fighting. All's Justice also features a Character Memory mode with dedicated episodes for most of the game's heroes. A Free Battle mode is also available for you to fight without commitment.

However, just like in story mode, the Team-Up Mission is also somewhat hampered by unfair AI. While not as bad as in story mode, many enemies have super armor or fight in groups, which can make battles a bit frustrating. Combine this with many missions that are very similar and lengthy, and the mode becomes a good idea, but one that could’ve been better executed.

My Hero Academia: All's Justice looks, sounds, and plays better than One's Justice, and has many details that fans of the series will love. In Free Battle, where there are no ridiculous difficulty spikes, you'll probably have more fun than in the other modes, where an unfair difficulty jump will make you want to throw your controller on the floor.

It's a shame that All's Justice is incredibly frustrating when it should’ve been great. Hopefully, some balance patches should fix this in the future.