One blow, break your nose – review of the game “One-Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows”

One gets the impression that in terms of adapting the martial arts shōnen titles, Bandai has found an optimum that allows for a satisfactory quality with relatively small expenditures. For this reason, the next killings produced by this studio are identical, and their main distinguishing features come from the source materials. One-Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows is no exception.

The plot of the game is based on the events of the first few manga volumes and the first season of the anime. However, we do not observe the course of events from the perspective of Saitama and Genos. Instead, at the beginning of the game, we create our own hero, which we develop during the game. Our character has been woven into the story so as to participate in key moments known from the comic and animated versions.

UX in Japanese

The beginning of the game is not very encouraging. After creating your protagonist, we meet Lecture Man – a superhero whose power is an intrusive exposition of the reality and mechanics of the game. Introducing this character is a nice idea that fits very well with the One-Punch Man realities , but doesn’t make tutorial less boring.

Japanese creators once again, instead of a user-friendly menu, force us to run around an uninteresting lobby representing a fragment of the presented world. Someone may argue that such a solution serves greater immersion, diversification of the game and the possibility of communication with other users. In my opinion, however, it is impractical, not very aesthetic and irritating. The transition from the character creator to the two-player mode or the list of available missions takes almost a minute instead of a few seconds. The streets and rooms on which we can move are empty and simply ugly, and players rarely interact with each other, unless you include the Cronenberg’s true effect of penetrating a dozen characters standing in one place.

We are calling for reinforcements

The battles in One-Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows take place in the standard 3v3 system, but there are quite often exceptions to this rule. An interesting mechanic is the Hero Arrivals system. Both the heroes and their enemies often start the fight alone, while the screen displays a counter and a preview of the character who is running to help us (or them). Interestingly, they are both warriors known from comics and anime, created by the game’s creators, and created by other users playing online. Performing strong combinations of blows can also reduce the waiting time for support. Thanks to this, the creators could approach the power of Saitama in an interesting way. It has not been limited – the title character is still immune to attacks and can defeat the opponent with one blow, but it takes him much longer to reach the battlefield than with others.

The controls during the skirmishes are very simple. We basically have a weak and strong blow, a grab, up to three special attacks and a short-term transformation that allows us to perform a powerful super attack. All this can be done by pressing one or two buttons. We are unlikely to show off with sophisticated combos or with perfecting the sequences on the controller. The clashes, however, are diversified by random events – from boxes appearing on the board temporarily improving the character’s stats or restoring the health bar to a meteor shower.

A regular brawl, bitten by a radioactive erpeg

To balance the banal controls, One-Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows has been “enriched” with RPG elements. Unfortunately, in practice, they mainly boil down to duels with other similar opponents. In addition, we can perform side tasks, usually consisting in talking to a character (in text form, because the characters are selectively voiced), going to the indicated place, fighting and returning. Over and over again. As you might guess, it doesn’t make the game more interesting – quite the contrary. That annoying grindhowever, it is necessary, because it allows you to gain experience and advance in the ranking of heroes, which translates into greater strength and resistance of our hero and unlocks new attacks. In some cases, we can also increase the level of familiarity with strong characters, which increases the chances that they will come to our aid in future battles. We also earn money to buy cosmetics for our avatar, items that help in combat, as well as senseless things such as gestures that (theoretically) allow communication with other players moving around the game world.

One-Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows is a simple fighting game that could have been much nicer and more playable if the studio didn’t stick to its habits and gave up a few annoying elements. Tedious grinding , little variety of fights and a poor, quasi-open world? leave a negative impression despite the funny convention, the possibility of creating your own superhero and the interesting mechanics of Hero Arrivals .

We would like to thank Cenega for providing a copy of the game for review (PS4).