My Hero Academia: All’s Justice Preview – Rising to the final challenge

After a ten year run, My Hero Academia’s superhero high school drama has come to an end. The manga wrapped up its story in 2024, the anime adaptation aired its eighth and final season at the end of 2025, and now in 2026 it’s time for the video game series to smash through to its conclusion with My Hero Academia: All’s Justice.

The main draw for All’s Justice is to get to play through and experience this final story arc of My Hero Academia. There’s a fair bit of required knowledge because of this, like “Who’re these All For One and One For All fellows?” and “Wait, there’s a frog girl and a pervy boy with sticky balls for hair?” There’s also a real feeling that, if you’ve not kept up with the story so far, you’ll want to go back and catch up, whether you do so via the previous two games – One’s Justice and One’s Justice 2 – or work your way through the source materials.

Still, given that it’s the final showdown, you should know roughly what to expect, as it builds up to one climactic battle between Midoriya and All For One. Along the way, there’ll be other big narrative beats for other key characters and heroes, and no doubt a few noble sacrifices. It’s one of these battles that we got to experience, with the bull-headed Bakugo taking on All For One. It’s a titanic battle, set amidst a ruined chunk of the city, and mixing together animated scenes with the super-powered combat at the core of this game. Given that it’s Bakugo fighting, this chunk of the story is suitably filled with explosions.

The combat system remains familiar from the previous two games in the series, and this genre in general. You nip around a 3D battle arena looking to get into position to unleash a string of close-quarters hits, make the most of your particular character’s Quirk abilities, including their cinematic Plus Ultra attack, and keep a watchful eye for when you need to guard, counter or dodge incoming attacks. There’s the typical cat and mouse of trying to close the gap to enemies, with the AI sometimes keeping a quite frustrating amount of distance when you’ve got a generally close combat character, like Bakugo with his explosive fists.

What’s new for this game is the Rising meter. This builds up as you fight, and once filled lets you trigger a souped up version of your fighter, boosting their attack power, movement speed and recovery speed. It gives you a good boost, coming with a little cinematic and a change in stance or form. For Bakugo, his shoulder blasters come up, for Izuku he engages his armoured fists into a more powerful mode, for Fumikage, his Dark Shadow grows and takes centre stage to absolutely batter enemies.

This really comes to the fore in the full 3v3 battling, where you get to choose three characters and switch back and forth between them, adapting character abilities and play styles as you go. There’s a tactical element to choosing when and where to use Rising, just as much as there is for using a Plus Ultra attack, or saving that up to use multiple charges in a multi-character Plus Ultra Combo.

Through the game are two control modes, with the “Normal Control” mode the default which is recommended for beginners where a single button is all that’s needed while your character dynamically unleashes combos, Quirks and Plus Ultra moves. I personally found the “Manual Control” mode gave me much better results, as I had more control over what my character was doing.

Away from the story mode, the game is wrapped up in an open world area virtual space which you can explore in a number of ways. The Team Up Mission mode presents a whole host of scenarios for you to take a team of three into. Confronting the Formidable, for example, takes a battle from the story and rewrites it as a training scenario for Midoriya created by teacher Eraser Head. It does go a bit sideways, though, when the AI characters that have been created go rogue…

The main problem I found with this was that there felt like there was a chunk of filler in this scenario. It’s a handful of fairly tame battles, some lame chase scenes where you’re running down an alley filled with barrels and metal bars, and then random encounters when going between mission points in the open world. I have to hope that other Team Up Missions are more engaging, but there was a bit of fun to be had in the scenario.

By contrast, the Hero’s Diary mode (which is unlocked by completing the Team Up Mission mode) cuts out the chaff and features original mini-stories for a bunch of the supporting characters from Class 1-A. Each character memory has three segments, which are either a cutscene, battle or some kind of exploration or other task. Minoru Mineta has to try to race through checkpoints by mastering the parkour possibilities of his hair balls, Mina Ashido just wants to find cats in a playground, Eijiro Kirishima has a boisterous battle to prove he’s the toughest character of them all.

As My Hero Academia: All’s Justice looks to wrap up this series narrative in explosive fashion, the fresh additions of Rising and Plus Ultra Combo are going to bring an added layer to the 3V3 combat. I’m a little less convinced about how essential the additional modes and open world are going to be, but they are there as asides to the core pillars of this finale, giving more characters their time in the spotlight.