My Hero Academia All's Justice


A couple months ago I wrote about this game's predecessor. I hoped this game would be more attuned to my taste, and I'd say it succeeded at that.


Tagging

The main thing shake up I was looking forward to was Active Tag replacing Assists. I would've liked if this game simply had both, but regardless I appreciate the addition, I like Active Tag. The addition of Tagging in part means that you actually play as your full team in this game (in the previous game 2 of your characters were just for Assists), and I like getting to play as multiple characters.
 
Active Tag does a good job compensating for something that many people argue was magnified by this game, the characters still generally feel very basic. The removal of Dash-Cancels particularly irks people, although I didn't really care much for or use Dash-Cancels much in the previous game. I've had plenty of fun labbing out combos in this game.
 

With that said though, I do agree with the sentiment that individual characters can feel shallow, although my opinion varries a bit on a character to character basis. Thankfully 3 of characters I went into the game most wanting to play, Sero, Mirko, Armored All Might, have been fun for me (I had Monoma on my team at first (as seen in some of the clips above) but for once I decided to hop off a character after they got nerfed. I'm not really dissatisfied with him, but someone needed to get kicked off the team if I wanted to play Mirko).
 
There's quite a bit of jank and just generally odd interactions that occur when someone gets hit while Tagging. The most common and tame oddity is that you can't control your 2nd character until your opponent stops hitting your 1st character.
 
Admittedly I think this is fine, it just feels unusual for the genre.
 
Certain interactions such as getting forcefully Tagged by Monoma while in a situation like above can cause the receiving player to lose access to their ability to attack.
 
 
I've only ever lost the ability to attack once in an actual match so far, but as you can probably imagine it was brutal. I can imagine bugs like that getting on my nerves more as I play more and more, although the one time it happened I was able to laugh it off.


Rising

I like Rising as a mechanic, although I feel just like every other game I've seen with an install mechanic that grants character specific buffs, the effects from character to character are really hit or miss. Rising Actions (special moves exclusive to Rising) are oftentimes especially lame since a lot of them are shared between characters.


 
Trying to use some of the better Risings against an actual human being can make the game's really defensive neutral really apparent. Some matchups feel nearly impossible as certain characters since running away from your opponent is so effective, if you play a slow character then chasing your opponent down becomes a nightmare.


Movement And Defense

Despite what I said earlier about some of the matchup balancing, I do generally enjoy this game's neutral. I think a massive thing that makes it feel a lot nicer to me than the last game is the addition of a standard air block. While there's still a bit of a lockout, I noticed you can block during air-dashes, it reminds me of how dash-blocking feels in some games like Guilty Gear Strive in which you can maintain a lot of forward momentum while blocking. Air blocking does make the lack of a universal air unblockable a lot more prevalent, having an air-special that unblockables feels privileged in this game. Perfect Guard is still present, but like the last game I struggle to do it literally ever (the Perfect Guard tutorial was the only tutorial that took me longer than a minute). Fastfall has also replaced double jumping, and I think I like that, I don't need the game to be so vertical, and fastfall is useful for tag combos.
 
It's still hard to pull off mixups and generally strong pressure in this game, so a lot of it (at least without the skill to Perfect Guard) does still revolve around trying to unblockale your opponent while they're locked down in blockstun. Usually Active Tag is considered more obnoxious than Assists, but somehow I actually feel like Tagging in this game is less obnoxious than the Assists in the last game. I guess preemptively striking your opponent is more effective at stopping Tagging in this game than Assists in the last game, since Assists didn't wait for your opponent's combo to end. Maybe it's the Guard Cancel that I like better, while you don't get a billion invulnerability frames, it's cheaper and you can get full combo punishes instead of simply knocking the opponent off of you.
 

Inputs

One odd thing about this game is the sheer number buttons it uses. There are 9 buttons, and none of those are optional macros. I think the game could've been pretty reasonably consolidated into 7 buttons. I don't actually take issue with the buttons though, clicking R3 to activate Rising and Burst sounds awkward conceptually, but in practice I've found it works fine on a standard controller. Learning all the inputs is a hassle, but that applies to most games in general, and playing the previous One's Justice game gave me a good headstart.
 
I appreciate the input buffer in this game being (relative to other fighting games) extremely large, it's like 30+ frames from what I can tell. (This wraps back to All's Justice in a bit) I don't buy much into the concept of there being"too much input buffer" in any fighting games. Sure there are instances in which a misinput comes out due to the input buffer, but that happens infrequently enough that the sheer convenience of not having to time all my inputs within 1/12 of a second or so pretty confidently outweighs the con. The main example people use of a fighting game with "too much input buffer" is Super Smash Bros Ultimate, but I feel like a lot of the frustration in that game moreso comes from the input priority system favoring riskier options over safer ones. I think All's Justice has a very well implemented buffer system, you can cancel buffered inputs by tapping the Guard button, and Guard doesn't get buffered.


Stages And Walls

The stages are fun. A lotta people take issue with the walls and elevation changes in most of them, but I actually enjoy that stuff perfectly fine. My biggest issues with them are that there simply aren't many of them in Free Battle (there's only 9), and half of them are pretty dark (I don't have issues seeing on them, I just think the darkness does a disservice to this game's nice visuals).
 
Wallsticks still exist in this game, although they're way less prevalent in part due to them simply being reduced in length, and in part due to this game's stages. 3 of the Free Battle stages don't have any fully interactable walls, and none of the stages have fully interactable walls on all sides. I didn't really mind wallsticks, but I appreciate the weird gravity changing stuff being seemingly completely removed, I thought that was the most awkward part about the previous game.


Launch Version Balance

Monoma had the ability to loop into his Rising Action, which was particularly crazy because it would reset Damage Scaling and Downpower (the combo limitation system), while not actually letting opponents out of the combo. Training Mode regenerates the opponents health during the loop, but I assure you in actual matches this sort of thing could TOD. This being removed is the Monoma nerf I alluded to earlier.
 
 
The video's description isn't super important to this blog post.
 
This Shigaraki combo got erroneously labeled as an infinite. As you can see in the video below, it was comically strong, but the game's infinite protection system does literally kick in. I've heard Lady Nagant supposedly has an "infinite" as well, but I've never actually seen it, so I don't know the validity of it.
 

From what I could tell though this high damage stuff was overall the exception (and the examples I used were already patched). There is a burst mechanic, so it's not like you're never completely helpless against this stuff anyways, and in general the universal mechanics seem pretty adequate for preventing completely broken stuff. Like I mentioned earlier, Tagging has kinks that would be good to patch, but even that stuff doesn't seem to lead to any crazy strategies.


Modern Video Game

As of writing this, the game's update history has been a little odd. When the game launched, a supposed Version 1.1 patch was announced to release roughly day 1 (timezones and staggered platform releases make "day 1" fuzzy), but then it just didn't seem to release which really frustrated people because it sounded like it might fix some of the things people were having issues with. After about a week though it turned out 1.1 was a typo, the devs were actually just saying the 1.0 patch launched on launch day, which I feel like was already implied. Then like a week after that the first DLC character alongside Version 2.0 got shadow dropped. I really don't know what's in store for future updates to this game, releasing a DLC character 2.5 weeks in is unusual.
 
I'm willing to admit the devs/publisher never mislead me into believing the game would run well on Steam Deck, Valve themselves marked the game as unsupported, but that doesn't mean I'm just okay with it the game running poorly. I appreciate the game being a big visual step up from its predecessors, but ultimately I would've preferred just being able to run the game at a smooth framerate, there's nothing so ambitious about the game besides the graphics that I think justifies the game not running well on (relative to modern hardware) weaker hardware. I don't even actually experience the full beauty of the graphics anyways since I had to turn the graphics down for a playable framerate.
 

The framerate isn't bad enough to be a dealbreaker for me (exception: I can't really stand playing on the Aokigahara stage for long periods of time), thankfully the game has frameskip so I can tolerate 20-FPS, but it's a pervasive aspect of the game I find annoying.
 
Perhaps my biggest issue with this game is the online. There's no rollback or crossplay, which already means it sucks, but on top of that I get constant disconnects. I literally haven't been able to finish a single online match because I get disconnected every time. I was originally just gonna write it off as me playing on unsupported hardware but from what, while the issues seem most prevalent on PC, it's not bozos like me playing on Linux. It's a shame, the delay based netcode seems relatively tolerable from what I've played and heard, I would probably get a ton more fun out of this game if I could play online.


Training Mode

Just like the last game, Training Mode leaves a good chunk to be desired. There's no dummy recordings, save states, the only viewable attack data is damage, quick reset still has a lot of elements persist, and you can't enable the Tag-regen buff that requires one of your characters to die. Aside from that last thing, it's still at least fine for labbing out combos and blockstrings.
 
 

Story And Basically Story

Story Mode is a pretty standard affair for the genre. The gameplay consists of fighting not particularly interesting CPU's with juiced damage and health stats to give you some sort of challenge. There's a special Spinner NPC that you fight at one point, but I didn't find it particularly memorable. The final boss was interesting, their gameplay design is actually the sort of thing I wanna see more in fighting game single player modes. Their attacks are telegraphed so the player can interact with them by reacting, but they're not so telegraphed to make the fight easy. Unfortunately the CPU still gets crazy stats compared to the player, the fight is pretty lengthy at about 15 minutes for a regular successful attempt, and some of the characters you're forced to play as literally don't appear anywhere else in the Story mode so you have a lot to learn on the spot, unless you go out of your way to learn those characters in a different mode first. Worst of all though I think the boss's AI was bugged, they usually have a distinct pace of how often they attack during each phase, but with seemingly no rhyme or reason the boss would attack way more often, sometimes performing sequences of attacks that I don't think are avoidable. It wasn't in the Version 2.0 patch notes, but I wasn't able to get it to occur for an example.
 
I think the fight is almost pretty cool, it's pretty climactic, but I think it's way too demanding to feel fair. Thankfully there's a system that actually swings the stats in your favor if you keep loosing frequently enough, so I didn't just get hard stuck.
 
Gameplay wise, Archive Battle is pretty much the same as Story Mode, it just has a more linear structure. The stories of both modes are just highlights of the original manga's story, it's not really enough highlights to act as decent summary though. I guess the main Story just being the Final War arc was nice in a way since that was maybe the coolest chunk of the whole series. The 3D animated cutscenes are nice, but most cutscenes are just screenshots from the anime. Since this game was developed largely before the anime was finished, there's a couple of cutscenes near the very end that feature a completely different artstyle which were neat albeit jarring.

Anime Screenshots -> 3D Animated -> Original 2D Animation (these are not back to back in-game)


Team-Up Mission

I didn't like the Team-Up Mission mode which is particularly a shame because it's the longest single player mode, and other modes like Archive and Hero Diary aren't fully available until you play through Team-Up Mission. I don't tend to like exploration based games, so I didn't have my dreams crushed when it turned out I didn't end up having much fun.
 
I found the 2 maps boring, and the prevalence of verticality was extremely annoying depending on what characters I was playing as. Finding main story progression usually wasn't much of a hassle, except for Mission 15 which I found absolutely dreadful. Usually you have circles on the map pointing you to the general areas of objectives, but in Mission 15 you have to find like 60 civilians without any pointers as to where they are. I stumbled around for like 2 hours until the game inexplicably told me I was done.

Unguided scavenger hunts are my least favorite thing to do in video games.

The movement in general is clunky, I guess you could call it momentum based because you can't turn or stop on a dime if you're moving too fast, but I wouldn't call it smooth. The camera is also annoying to work with, the controls don't suit having to move around the right stick constantly.

This course isn't required for progression, but it's a great example of how wack this game feels.

Some of the character specific abilities are kinda fun at least, I like Deku & Bakugo, and being able to Tag while mid-air is genuinely cool.
 

For some reason pretty much every enemy in this mode (along with Hero Diary and the hub world) has constant super armor. I didn't actually mind the super armor a ton, since fights in other modes don't tend to feel very mindful anyways, but I do think it too heavily incentivizes zoning.
 

Side quests very quickly felt like the biggest waste of time. Like the main story missions, they aren't very interesting, but they aren't even level specific. Every time you enter a level, a random handful of side quests get placed around the area, and you'll run into the same ones very often. They can be a nightmare to find in the first place because they aren't marked on the map (unless you bring certain characters onto your team). Because of their random nature, and because they give you stat increases, they end up feeling like RPG style grinding to me. Bizarrely a large part of the gamemode's ranking system is based around how many side quests you complete throughout each level, so the ranking system also feels like grinding to me.

The plot is also boring. It's just about characters very loosely roleplaying the events of the manga as a form of training. There's a heavy emphasis on virtual reality being the setting, but it's really weirdly underutilized. Oftentimes characters like Aizawa and Endeavor will "roleplay" (they barely try) as villains like Shigaraki and Dabi, but then sometimes you fight digital recreations of villains. The plot tries to have some conflict by having the digital villains try to go rogue, but that doesn't get very far before being resolved, and it's not even the climax of the story. Occasionally there's some humorous moments which were my favorite parts.
 


Character Memory

Some of the Character Memory mode is just gallery stuff, rewatching cutscenes and listening to music, but I'd say the main attraction in it is the Hero Diary. Hero Diary is kinda like Team-Up Mission, except the gameplay takes a huge backseat. Instead of the story revolving around busy work, it's mostly about characters simply hanging out which I found a lot more charming. Since it's so laid back, not much of substance happens anyways, but I had an enjoyable time. I should also note Ida's Hero Diary goes pretty off the rails, it was exceptionally memorable.

A very pleasantly surprised with Character Memory was when I realized that simply sitting around with the menu pulled down will get your characters to start chatting with each other. There's quite a lot of dialogue, there's 20 characters, and each pair of characters seemingly has like 3-5 things they say to each other. It's not fully voice acted, and a lot of the dialogue is even less substantial than Team-Up Mission and Hero Diary, but I'm pleased with just how much of it there is. Like Hero Diary it's very chill.

I sped up the footage.


Other Menus

Overall the menus are mostly fine, and I think they look solid. Selecting costumes and changing controls being completely separate menus from the Free Battle is really inconvenient though. I've a lot of issue navigating the main menu, having some more distinguishing visual elements between options would be nice, as well as showing everything at once.


Completion

The hub world is about as interesting as Team-Up Mission, but it's way more arduous to actually try and actually complete stuff in it. I feel like I'm doing something wrong because while you're seemingly supposed to be able to initiate fights with every character in the game (except DLC characters I think), I've only been able to fight like 10 of them. For some reason Inasa seems pretty common to encounter. The hub world isn't guaranteed to refresh when hopping to a different menu, so I don't know any efficient way to find the hub world fights. That alongside the Team-Up Mission A-Ranks are the main things that would push me to obtaining all the achievements if I could bring myself to bother.
 
These are the last 2 achievements I have left as of writing this.

Getting every collectable seems a lot more outlandish though. In particular, there's this one trivia sidequest which the game requires you to play 100+ times to obtain everything from it. I don't think I've even done 50 sidequests in general.


Customization And Missing Stuff

The customization in this game is cool, but it feels perplexingly lacking. There's no longer individual equipment pieces for characters to wear, and while I didn't actually like them much in the previous game, their absence further emphasizes that I don't like most of the available color palettes.
 

A lot of people including myself were expecting a lot of Ultra Rumble costumes would get ported over, but that ended up just not being the case. There are very few alternate costumes in general, most of them are just bog standard school uniforms, and the actually fancy ones are paid DLC (plenty of which was Day 1 DLC).

 
I wouldn't personally use the costume, but I sympathize with the people that wanted to use the Dark Hero Deku costume. It's literally available in multiple of the previous games, and it's literally usable in All's Justice, but it's locked to a select few fights in the single player modes. I think there's some other restricted costumes as well, but that Deku costume has been the standout in discourse. Maybe they'll become obtainable through in-game events or daily login bonuses, but the same issue is present with stages and music as well.

 
Aside from the costumes/colors being disappointing, I like the customization. I really like in fighting games when you're able to select the playable characters to be the in-game announcer, and this game has that. There's even different voice lines for different versions of characters, so just like how there's 5 playable Dekus, there's 5 Deku announcer options. The character select banners in particular feel really cool and novel. For the hud customization, the selection of alternate healthbars is meager without the DLC, but I appreciate that you can put yuri on the hud.
 


 

Other Missing Stuff

1v1 battles have been removed from Free Battle (they were in One's Justice 2). I don't mind its absence since I likey wouldn't play it much anyways, but it's another thing that feels like it should be there, especially when 1v1 battles are everywhere in the single-player modes.
 
Plus Ultra 2's and whatever the triple simultaneous Plus Ultra was called were both removed, but I don't even hear people bring those up as interesting gameplay wise, people seemed to like Plus Ultra 2's just because they were flashy (and the triple Plus Ultra thing just isn't missed much from what I've seen). I think that's a fine reason to like 'em, but thought Plus Ultra 2's were too much of a pace breaker due to the length of their animations, and I also thought they were ugly, so I don't miss 'em. Granted I thought One's Justice 2 in general was ugly, so I guess it could've been nice to see Plus Ultra 2's in a game that I actually like the look of.
 
Perhaps the most strange omission is Before Style Shigaraki. All the other 50 playable character returned (Overhaul Ver. 2 was reduced into a Rising but still), just missing out on him is extremely strange. Before All's Justice released, I decided to check out BS Shiggy just to see what I would be missing out on.
 
The instant-kill requires some setup not shown in the clip.
 
Something I actually do miss a bit though is Arcade Mode. I didn't think it was even interesting in the last game, but this game weirdly doesn't have any singleplayer modes that allow every playable character. If I feel like playing my current main team, I just have to play Training or Free Battle.
 
 

Conclusion

Despite not caring much for most of the gamemodes, not being able to play online, and just generally being disappointed with a lotta aspects, I think might still consider this to be one of my favorite fighting games. Liking the general gameplay and a bunch of the characters triumphs over a lot of my issues at the end of the day.


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