My Hero Academia Deserves a Proper Fighting Game

As popular and action-packed as the anime and manga series is, My Hero Academia has been adapted into four games so far: My Hero Academia: Smash Tap, My Hero Academia: Clash! Heroes Battle, My Hero Academia: Tag Card Game, and My Hero Academia: Battle for All.

The latter, Battle for All (3DS), is the only fighting game that the series has to offer, but it isn’t quite enough to satisfy fans. One of the game’s most apparent issues is its lacking combo system. Most characters have only one Y-button ground combo and one Y-button air combo (unfortunately, some characters such as All Might only have a single 2-hit ground combo). In addition to those are the X-button strong attacks, which often launch the opponent to either reset or in some cases, extend combos.

To be fair, the game intends for the player to use the Y-button and X-button moves to form combos together, but the possible combinations are extremely limited. With characters such as Bakugo and Uraraka, you also need to perform an A-button dash after launching a character to extend combos, since that’s the only possible action after the massive endlag for certain moves. It’s hard to tell whether dashing was intended for only approaching or if it was intended for combo extensions as well. The way in which I used the dashing for this game is reminiscent of the way I used Ninja Move Cancels in Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm 3.

The saving grace (which in itself is an overstatement) for the game’s combos are the support character attacks. They allow combos to extend far beyond what any playable solo character could possibly achieve. Even then, you end up repeating the same moves such as stringing Midoriya and Shigaraki’s command grabs.

Speaking of those two, their combo-to-special techniques do the most damage (over 50% health) in the game despite the damage scaling and require less hits and less effort than a combo from a more complex character like Bakugo or Todoroki who don’t even reach 50%. Unbalanced damage scaling is a huge issue precisely because a character could hit less and cause still damage more than another character would, making one significantly less viable than another.

My Hero Academia: Battle for All barely passes in regard to its battle system, but thanks to some patience and practice, I was able to make use of it for the combo video above.

Hopefully, the future of My Hero Academia games will reflect or even surpass the visual and technical level of the popular upcoming game, Dragonball FighterZ. While we all patiently wait for that dream to be reality, below is my visualization of what a “FighterZ-style” My Hero Academia game would look like.

Thanks for reading! Those who are interested in art requests can reach me here.

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