There are certain franchises where I know I am not the most objective person in the room and I’m afraid My Hero Academia is one of them. I have followed Deku, Bakugo, All Might, and the rest of Class 1-A for years, and at this point even the Vigilantes spin-off has managed to pull me in. Something about the world Kohei Horikoshi created works so well for me: superhero stories filtered through anime logic, a society built around superpowers, characters defined almost entirely by what their abilities say about them, and fights that somehow get more and more ridiculous without losing their emotional layer. So yes, putting all of that into a large 3D arena fighter already gives MY HERO ACADEMIA: All’s Justice a fairly significant advantage. Give me Mirko kicking someone through a wall, and I’m listening… Oh, you want the review? Let’s dive in then.

The good news is that All’s Justice gave me a lot more to do than I expected. I came in mainly interested in the fights, but there is a decent amount of single-player content alongside the online battles. Story, Team-Up Mission and Archive Battles all give you something different to jump into, while the main fights are built around teams of three characters. The less good news? Anime arena fighters still have a remarkable talent for annoying me. All’s Justice can look spectacular when everyone starts throwing attacks across the screen, but there were also moments where I just wanted a cleaner fight and a better idea of what was happening. The final boss was easily the biggest example of that.

One last war

All’s Justice focuses heavily on the Final War arc, which makes it a pretty strange place to start if you don’t already know My Hero Academia. This is not the game to buy if you want to follow Deku from his first day at U.A. It expects you to know these characters already. You should probably understand why Bakugo and Shigaraki are important, who All For One is and why everyone would quite like him to stop doing horrible things. For existing fans, I think that’s perfectly fine. Actually, I prefer it this way. Trying to squeeze the entire My Hero Academia story into another arena fighter would have taken forever, and I didn’t need the game to explain every character to me again before getting to the Final War.

The Final War is almost perfect material for an arena fighter. Huge attacks, ridiculous power escalation and characters reaching their strongest forms work pretty well when most fights eventually involve launching somebody across an arena. The story mode takes you through those final confrontations with cinematic sequences and playable battles, including Deku facing Shigaraki and Bakugo taking on All For One. I had a lot of fun with those fights. I’ve spent years watching these characters throw ridiculous attacks at each other, so finally being the idiot pressing the button myself was always going to entertain me. Sometimes that’s really all I want from an anime game. Let me pick the character I like and press whatever button causes half the screen to explode. That is, admittedly, about 70 percent of the appeal of anime games, looking at you, Dragon Ball.

Three heroes walk into an arena

Combat is built around 3v3 battles, so you’re constantly switching between the three characters on your team. You can combine their Quirks and keep attacks going by bringing somebody else into the fight, which gave me plenty to experiment with. Some characters want to get right in your face, while others are much better at keeping their distance or making parts of the arena particularly unpleasant places to stand. Rising adds another option when things get messy, temporarily boosting your attack power, movement speed and Quirk actions, and messy is definitely the right word here. Characters fly across the arena, effects cover half the screen and some attacks are so ridiculously large that I occasionally needed a second to figure out where everyone had gone. For My Hero Academia, I can live with that, I don’t necessarily want Bakugo politely waiting for his turn. I also didn’t need hours before I could start having fun with the combat since th e basics are easy enough to pick up, and after that I started messing around with different teams and switching characters during combos to see what I could get away with. I’m certainly not about to enter a tournament with any of this, and this game won’t suddenly replace Tekken at EVO, but it doesn’t need to.

There is also considerably more to do than just playing through the Final War. Team-Up Mission puts Deku and Class 1-A into a virtual training environment, where you form teams, complete missions and fight villains in an original scenario. Keep playing and you’ll open up things like Archive Battles, which take you back to fights from earlier parts of the series, and Hero’s Diary, where some of the characters get a little more time to themselves. I was glad all of that was there. Focusing on the Final War makes sense for the main story, but My Hero Academia has spent years building a ridiculously large cast and I wanted an excuse to use more of them. Everyone has a favorite character who received approximately eleven minutes of screen time. But hold up, apparently we can finally do something about that. The roster includes Class 1-A, pro heroes such as Mirko and Best Jeanist, and villains including Shigaraki, Dabi and All For One. Many of them appear in their later forms too, so there’s plenty to mess around with once you start putting teams together. I definitely spent some time picking characters because I liked them instead of worrying about whether they made the smartest possible team. I’m playing My Hero Academia, so sometimes I just want Mirko on my team. You can also unlock poses, voice lines, banners, colors and other cosmetic items for your characters and online profile. I didn’t care equally about everything I unlocked, and some costumes are sold separately, but I liked having little things opening up as I continued playing. It gave me something else to check between fights without turning the whole game into an endless hunt for cosmetics.

Going Plus Ultra online

For many players, the real longevity will probably come from online play. Once you’ve finished the Final War and worked through the single-player content, you can take those 3v3 teams online and see how well they actually hold up against another player. Against the AI, you can get away with repeating certain patterns, but another human being tends to notice, quite rudely. Switching characters at the right moment, learning what different Quirks can do and knowing when to trigger Rising should all become much more important when the person on the other side has also spent hours putting together their favorite team. I can easily see dedicated MHA fans spending a lot of time here, especially when half the fun is proving that your favorite character is objectively better than somebody else’s. The internet has been training for this moment for years.

Unfortunately, my own biggest fight wasn’t against another player. It was against the final boss, and dear lord, I hated this thing. Some fights are difficult; others make me question whether the developers and I are playing by the same rules. And yes, I completed the tutorial. I even made myself a small cheat sheet and wrote down my combos. I was prepared but this battle still drove me insane. The problem isn’t simply that it’s hard, hard is fine, I died plenty of times elsewhere and usually knew what I had done wrong. Here, there was so much happening on screen that I regularly struggled to read attacks or figure out where I needed to be. I’d lose, try again and sometimes still have no idea what I was supposed to do differently but after spending hours learning my characters and getting better at switching between them, that’s not how I wanted the final battle to go. Eventually I beat it, but my main reaction wasn’t satisfaction, I was just glad it was over. It didn’t ruin All’s Justice for me, and I still enjoyed plenty of what came before it, but ending the Final War like that certainly didn’t help… That’s probably not the Plus Ultra feeling they were aiming for.

A good fit for Switch 2 and the fans

Thankfully, I had a much easier time with the Switch 2 version itself. All’s Justice looks good on the system, and the colorful characters and completely ridiculous Quirk effects survive the move to Nintendo’s hardware without much trouble. Some of the bigger attacks still fill half the screen, while characters such as Bakugo are about as subtle as you’d expect. I also enjoyed having this one on a handheld. Playing a few missions or unlocking another character before putting the system away suited me perfectly, and I regularly ended up playing that way. More importantly, I wasn’t sitting there thinking about the Switch 2 version while I was playing it, ater some of the ports I’ve reviewed recently, that’s a compliment.

I’ve followed My Hero Academia for years, so All’s Justice was obviously aimed straight at me. I know these characters, I wanted to play through the Final War and yes, I have opinions about whether Mirko deserved more screen time. I had fun with it too. There are loads of characters I wanted to try, I enjoyed revisiting older fights and throwing enormous Quirk attacks around is still a very easy way to entertain me. I just wish the final stretch had left me feeling better about the whole thing. That boss fight annoyed me far more than anything else in the game, and unfortunately it was one of the last things All’s Justice asked me to do. I still came away liking the game, I just wasn’t shouting Plus Ultra when the credits rolled.

Conclusion

I had a lot of fun with MY HERO ACADEMIA: All’s Justice. I’ve followed these characters for years, so getting to play through the Final War, try out a huge part of the cast and throw increasingly ridiculous Quirks around was an easy sell for me. I also didn’t expect to spend as much time with the single-player content as I did. I just wish my last big memory of the game wasn’t that final boss. I finished it, I hated it, and I have absolutely no desire to fight it again but luckily, one terrible battle doesn’t erase all the fun I had before reaching it. All’s Justice isn’t the MHA game I’ll be talking about for the next ten years, but I enjoyed my time with it and can definitely see myself jumping back in whenever I feel like sending Bakugo across an arena again. The final boss, however, deserves to be expelled from U.A.

7.5/10

Tested on the Nintendo Switch 2