In a world clouded in darkness and chaos reigns supreme, the world turns to its heroes to make their day brighter. Sadly, when those heroes fail or struggle to maintain peace, who does the world turn to? Who will rise to the occasion to become a new hero? Will it be your neighbor down the street? Your best friend? Or will it be you? The popular anime One-Punch Man focuses on this concept, where unknown superhero Saitama rises to the occasion. In One-Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows, the player becomes the hero of their own narrative despite the help of Saitama.
Prior to reviewing this game, I was a diehard fan of the franchise. In fact, I had shown countless others the series and rewatched it multiple times. Sadly, One-Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows does not live up to franchise expectations. The game felt more like pulling teeth than a game meant to enhance the franchise, more like a grindfest than anything else. If you are not side-questing and power-leveling, then you are accomplishing nothing. The game focuses on constant leveling and fetch quests.
Gameplay
When the game starts, the player can watch an opening cinematic highlighting the key characters in the game. Once the opening cinematic is over, the player is first tasked with designing a character to represent them in the world. Every aspect of the game takes place in the world hub, which can be infuriating. Do you want to play PVP or against bots for practice? If you answered yes, then you have to load into the world hub. What’s more infuriating is that One-Punch Man‘s world hub is often laggy, with AI’s often taking multiple seconds to spawn, the character having a blurred running animation, and other world events being poorly timed.
The world hub being so laggy is shocking since the game relies heavily on loading screens. Every time you enter a new battle, a cutscene, a quest, or exit a battle the game has a loading screen. What makes matters worse is that the loading screen is bland and only provides tips on how to play the game. For the first time read, these tips can be helpful, but after reading all the tips it becomes rather annoying. During our playthrough, we spent about the same amount of our time fighting as we did in loading screens or waiting for AIs to spawn.
The world hub offers little variety. The player is tasked with unlocking each area after completing a set number of quests. This makes the opening area quite bland Other than talking to the AI, the player can shop for furniture for their apartment, pick up new skills, purchase item boosts, and snag new clothing. In online mode, the player is able to talk with other players, emote, gather items, and even PVP. The PVP in the game is rather limited too.
Leveling & Fighting Style
The game’s fighting system is determined by two factors, Hero Ranking and Power ranking. A mission’s power ranking determines how difficult the enemies. The scale goes from one fist to seven fists with varying factors present in each fight. Some fights are limited by different battle styles. The player’s character starts with the standard fighting style but can learn eight other fighting styles as the game progresses. Personally, the Psychic fighting style was our favorite but had that comes with a weakness to close-quarter combat. As the player levels, so does their combat style, granting the ability to equip additional moves including a killer move. Strangely enough, some missions in the game actually require the player to use specific battle styles and will not allow one progress without it.
The player’s stats and skillsets feel rather limited. As the player levels, they are able to attach different skils to their character. Skills can be earned either through missions, the store, or building rapport with hero characters. In addition to unlocking skill slots, the player earns growth points that can be assigned to five categories. The five categories are HP, Attack, Killer Move, Technique, and Appeal. HP and Attack are rather straightforward stats. Killer Move increases the damage of the player’s abilities. The Technique stat increases the recovery speed of the Move Gauge. Finally, the Appeal stat increases the likelihood of a hero character’s arriving and their level of strength.
The player has the opportunity to befriend heroes, which can earn them items, skills, and clothing. Items can be used when selecting a mission to give them a variety of boosts. Some said boosts are an increase to time, move gauge, XP, Hero XP, Style XP, and random encounters.
Combat & Characters
Combat in One-Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows can also be frustrating; frustrating enough to almost break the controller, instead I deleted the game once my review responsibilities were complete. Players can activate special abilities depending on how much energy is gathered in their move gauge. Items will randomly drop throughout the battle. Each battle type has its pros and cons. The biggest flaw in the combat system was the block gauge. The Block Gauge in this game is almost infinite. The only way to break the block is with a guard breaker move or an empowered punch. The game’s stamina bar is used to charge enemies or execute a perfect block.
The enemies/monsters in the game can be infuriating. The game seems to limit the combinations the player can use. On the otherhand, the AI is allowed to juggle the player’s character. During combat, encounters can occur that will either bring allies to help the fight or create environmental damage (Lightning Storm, Giant Foot Stomp, or Meteorites). The reinforcement gauge is sped up by perfect guards or landed combinations. Once allied reinforcements arrive, they will stay throughout the fight.
Controls
The game’s controls are rather similar to most fighters. With X being light attack and Y being heavy attack. The A button is used to jump while B is supposed to be used for blocking. Sadly, the block feature does not work as intended and can be inconsistent. Players use the left trigger to charge up their power gauge and when at a certain power level unleash a killer move by using left trigger and X, Y, or B. The ultimate killer move is activated by pressing in the right stick after the player has changed modes. Finally, the left and right bumpers are used to communicate with other players when playing online. The controls feel a little bit too busy while not even utilizing them all. Yes, the layout is easy to remember but it feels like a bit too much.
Music / Sound
The music/sound of One-Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows was probably the second-worst attribute of the game. The game’s combat music varies between two tracks, both of which get rather boring after a while. The tracks for the open-world vary between the player’s location. From our playthrough, we noticed three different open-world soundtracks: 1. in the nicer mall area 2. in the beaten-down monster destroyed part of town and 3. at the Hero’s Association. These also got annoying quickly. The in-game sound effects sounded similar depending on the fighting style, offering little variation.
Finally, which was definitely the biggest pet peeve of the game, the game was dubbed for certain aspects but they were far and few in-between. Most cutscenes did not have the animated voices and were text boxes instead. What’s worse is some of the heroes’ voices sounded different than their anime counterparts. The created character is also required to select a voice type, but you rarely hear the chosen voice throughout.
Graphics
One-Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows’ graphics are not amazing but they are not horrible either. The game could have more detail on clothing and the world environment but just squeezes by with mediocrity. The biggest issue with the game’s graphics comes with in-game processing. As previously stated, the AI would take a while to spawn. One of the most annoying things that would occur took place during combat. If too many actions or things were going on during the fight, the game would slow down and take a while to process what was going on. The game’s environment was rather disappointing overall and could have been much better.
Replay Value
One-Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows provides little replayability. The game can easily be played with friends online for a fun back and forth PvP, but there is not a single moment in the game where replaying the missions feels good. The game forces one to grind levels in a generic way while offering little satisfaction when hitting a milestone.
Conclusion
The variety of characters that can be unlocked for combat is a rather decent pool. Where One-Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows fails is everything else. The world hub feels rather lackluster and is hurt more by lag than its limited area. The combat in the game is not smooth and the camera locks on to characters weirdly. The environment is somewhat destructible with the ground breaking during fights. Oddly, there are times in combat that the ground will magically heal itself. Despite character customization giving a variety of options, the monsters the player fights feel like randomly created characters, making these missions and enemies feel lackluster.
The game’s graphics and audio were average if not outright bad in places. I can happily say that I will never have to play this cursed game again. The game was as infuriating as playing Superman 64. I would only recommend this game to my worst enemies.
More information about One Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows can be found on the official website. A digital Xbox One copy was provided for the purpose of review.
For over-the-top action done right, check out my review of the latest port of Bayonetta. For more anime games, check out Alex’s recent review of My Hero One’s Justice 2 also for the Xbox One.
