My Hero Academia: All's Justice Review - Stunning But Shallow
It’s been a while since players jumped into the boots of hero course student Izuku Midoriya. Since the last game in the My Hero Academia: Justice series, the final story arcs were concluded, with the anime airing at the back end of 2025 and providing a conclusion that lived up to the hype and was received with near-critical acclaim. My Hero Academia: All’s Justice comprises the disparate events of the climactic battle, putting the player in control of both heroes and villains as the story builds to its dramatic conclusion.
But I can’t help but wonder why they decided to start the game from there.
Between the two previous entries in the series, players had only experienced the story to the equivalent of halfway through season 4 of the anime, leaving plenty of story content that not only builds to the final battle, but provides a huge amount of character growth not only for the heroes, but for the villains themselves. Granted, this game is made for fans of the series, and those fans will have already read the manga, watched the anime or, like me, done both. Despite having experienced the story in other media, being able to take control of the characters within the game allows the player a new way to experience these stories.
Alongside the Story Mode, players can take control of Class 1-A in Team-Up Missions. These missions are situated within a “simulation” and allow the player to experience past adventures as training exercises. Players are loaded into a section of the city populated by civilians, other heroes and villains as they complete the simulated objectives. On paper, this seems like a good way to flesh out the game, but in practice, it ends up with the player repeating the same side missions and wailing on nameless thugs while acting as though they are reliving a past situation. Everything about the mode feels very ‘meh’, but completing these Team-Up Missions gains you access to battles from throughout the entire MHA story. Personally, if developers Byking wanted to focus the Story Mode on the final confrontation, I would have much preferred to complete the Archive Battles, which utilise the same animated graphic novel storytelling as the Story Mode, allowing players to experience the big moments missing between the previous entry and the start of the final battle.
The thing is, this game looks really good. Between the anime-style artwork, voice acting performed by the full English dub cast, the manifestations of the quirk abilities of each character and their utilisation in combat combined with the razzle dazzle of the big, bombastic Plus Ultra moves, it is a shame it feels like a huge chunk of that combat experience is wasted on chump change thugs rather than the proper villains that almost brought the Pro-Hero society of MHA to total collapse.
Another aspect that doesn’t help the game, when combined with the same/same aspect of the Team-Up Missions, is that the combat controls aren’t all that deep. The standard ‘normal’ setting for the controls really dumbs down the coordination required to engage in these battles. Players can simply spam the one attack button, and the game will automatically chain attacks with Quirk-based moves for the most effective offensive combat. You can, and will, still find yourself hit by enemies and having to dodge, but the combat feels decidedly one-note. Just a word of advice, though, be careful when spamming that attack button. There is nothing worse than having the game automatically use one of your Plus Ultra big move charges on a guy ready to be knocked over by a slight breeze when their buddy is at full health and swinging a sword at you. That’s the price you pay for ease and convenience, I suppose. The simplified controls do allow the younglings to jump right in and feel they can compete in player vs player battles, and if you really want to challenge yourself, you can switch combat to manual input to get just that little bit more depth.
While My Hero: All’s Justice does a great job of putting the player in the climactic battle against Tomura Shigaraki, All for One and the remaining members of The League of Villains, having to trudge through the disappointing Team-Up Missions to access the Archive Battles and the one dimensional combat that reduces controls to spamming a single button makes this game hard to recommend to all but the most die hard MHA fans or as a game for kids who are into the anime and won’t care about the control schemes as they shout “DETROIT SMASH” in time with Izuku Midoriya.
My Hero Academia: All’s Justice was reviewed on PS5 with code kindly supplied by the publisher.
