One Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows Delights In Its Own Ridiculousness

You’d have to have been living under a rock to have not heard about the One Punch Man franchise. Besides My Hero Academia, One Punch Man is one of the most globally recognisable anime and manga series active today, but despite its mainstream success, it’s taken around eight years since the first chapter of the manga for a full price game to emerge, that game being One Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows.

A Hero Nobody Knows is a 3v3 brawler where you control various characters from the franchise in epic battles. It’s your typical anime brawler, with a simple control scheme, plenty of callbacks and references to the franchise as a whole and enough action on screen to really make the most out of that huge 4K TV you spent too much money on.

Of course, One Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows has a couple of unique tricks to make the game more unique than other anime brawlers like Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm or My Hero One’s Justice. These tricks pull from the franchise’s unique traits to create gameplay scenarios that are both authentic and interesting.

For one, random events can occur which can drastically alter the course of the fight. These events can be other characters interfering with the match, to surprise item drops, status effects or just straight up alien invasions. The series prides itself on the “anything can happen” nature of its story and characters, so it makes sense that those attributes have translated well to A Hero Nobody Knows.

The other unique system at play is the Hero Arrival System, as it affects Saitama, the series’ main character. He is the titular One Punch Man, meaning he can defeat his foes in just one simple punch, and this is also true for the video game. All it takes is for one single punch to land, and Saitama and his team wins the match.

If that sounds broken to you, don’t worry: it kind of is. However, A Hero Nobody Knows uses the Hero Arrival System to create some form of balance. If you add Saitama to your 3-person team, he’ll only arrive after a set amount of time, meaning your team of two characters will have to survive for a while until Saitama can show up and obliterate the competition.

Players can perform perfect guards and combos to shorten the amount of time it takes for Saitama to show up, meaning you need to make a choice. You can try and keep your distance from your opponent, prolonging the fight but risking less damage, or you can try and launch some offense in order to decrease your survival time. Both strategies have their benefits, and it doesn’t matter how you get the win, so long as you win, right?

The Hero Arrival System filters into the game’s Story Mode, where you play as an entirely new character who was inspired to become a hero after being rescued by Saitama, echoing his own origins when becoming a hero. Whether or not your hero managed to muster 100 push-ups, 100 sit-ups, 100 squats and a 10km run per day as well is up to your own head canon. Personally, I sometimes struggle to write 100 words, so that workout sounds like too much.

As a new member of the Hero Association, you’re given a series of missions where you take down robbers and deal with monsters attacking the city, but because you’re a new hero and are relatively untrained, you have to rely on bigger, stronger heroes to do the lion’s share of the work. As such, certain missions will require you to hold out until someone more capable of handling the threat arrives.

Naturally, as you progress through the game and become stronger, you’ll be able to take on bigger threats, rising through the ranks of the Hero Association with the hopes of joining that fabled S class of hero. The game makes a joke about how repetitive that cycle can be, but with the unpredictable nature of One Punch Man, there’s sure to be more to discover on your journey as a hero.

One Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows is your typical anime brawler at its core, but the changes give the game a level of randomness that could keep the game interesting, whether as a single player story experience or as a fighting game to enjoy with friends. At the very least, you can create a hero with a fish head dressed in a snazzy suit, who beats up fools with a baseball bat, and if that’s not a reason to be excited for A Hero Nobody Knows, I don’t know what is.