My Hero Academia may be the most popular anime in America right now, or you’d think so given the amount of chatter about it. After the release of the fighting game My Hero: One’s Justice in 2018, Bandai decided we didn’t have enough Quirk-fighting, friend-smashing, beat-'em-up action. And so, a sequel was announced at Anime Expo 2019, and a public demo of the game was made playable at New York Comic Con. Did I wait in line for it? Of course I did.
My Hero: One’s Justice 2 is a fighting game, and attendees partnered up at the con to play in pairs against each other. I don’t know much about the anime except for the basics that I’ve picked up from friends’ obsessive love about it. So, going into character choice, I just chose someone that looks cool: Jiro Kyoka. You also get to choose two “sidekick” characters, but that didn't end up factoring into the fight.
Poor Jiro was set up to fight my partner’s hero of choice, All Might. We didn’t have a tutorial, just jumped straight into the fighting. There were three rounds per match, winner takes all, and each demo was one match long. That doesn’t sound like a lot of time to get a feel for a game, but with the fast-paced action, a lot happened in a short amount of time.
Jiro was easy enough to use, and the game plays pretty much like any other arena fighter. The camera jumps around between the two characters, which was sometimes inconvenient when either I or my partner was fighting blindly due to the great view of a concrete pillar that we had momentarily. I couldn’t tell if the camera operated like that all the time or if it was just because we were playing a two-person local match and it was trying for the best of both worlds.
My biggest complaint about the controls was that the button to deploy sidekicks didn’t seem to work consistently, or at all. However, with such short matches there was no time for tutorials. After winning the first round, I went on to get curb-stomped in the second and put up a respectable showing in the third.
My Hero: One’s Justice 2 is definitely aimed at fans of the anime and manga. If you’re not into that world, it’s easy and fun enough to pick up the game for a few rounds, but it’s made much harder by not knowing the character’s abilities and weaknesses, which it seems like the game expects you to. If you enjoyed the first game, you’re sure to enjoy this too, but there was nothing so far that stood out to make it appeal to a wider audience.
Are you excited for My Hero: One’s Justice 2? Which character do you want to play as? Let us know in the comments below!
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Courtney Ehrenholfer is an aspiring novelist and screenwriter, and current journalist who greatly enjoys video games, especially those of the point and… More about Courtney
