With the release of My Hero One’s Justice, the smash hit anime series finally makes its debut in the world of video games. It provides plenty of Quirk-powered battles for fans to experience, and while it may not be the best anime game out there, it’s still a good time. However, My Hero Academia is a series rife with potential for video games, and there could be some truly great experiences if done correctly. Here are five ideas the future of My Hero Academia games should use.
Features Future My Hero Academia Games Need to Have
School Setting and Exploration
One of the most unique things about My Hero Academia is its school setting mixed with the superhero genre, showing heroes-in-training at the prestigious U.A. High School. With a fantastic cast of characters in Class 1-A, My Hero Academia would be absolutely perfect for a Persona-like experience.
Imagine being able to roam the halls of U.A. as Deku, hanging out with your classmates, exploring, taking hero courses, and more. Of course, this would all be broken up by some kind of combat system that either follows the main story of the manga/anime, or an entirely new one. Add Class 1-B, the teachers, and some of the other students we’ve seen into the mix, and you have a robust school body that would easily fill a small open world area.
There aren’t a ton of series out there that would be able to perfectly adapt the Persona formula, but My Hero Academia certainly seems like one of them. The potential for having a time-management school system is boundless, but even if you didn’t want to go that far simply having a virtual U.A. to explore would be a delight to fans, and a great way to expand on the world of the series even more.
Features Future My Hero Academia Games Need to Have
Prequel Story About Young All Might
My Hero One’s Justice simply recaps the events of the anime, but we’ve seen there’s huge potential for original stories in the My Hero universe, looking at The Two Heroes movie and Vigilantes manga. While The Two Heroes gave us a peek at the early career of young All Might, it feels like there’s so much there that could be explored.
All Might is the number one hero in the world, and you better believe it was a long road to get there. This story is something that’d be perfect to explore in an open world video game. Playing as young All Might you’d take down various villains and protect the citizens, while he’s training in the United States. Looking at One Piece: World Seeker, a similar experience could easily work for My Hero Academia.
Present a big open world city that you can run around in as All Might, and let you experience his explosive powers in the height of his prime. Young All Might is a story that absolutely has to be explored more in some way, shape, or form.
Features Future My Hero Academia Games Need to Have
Quirk-Based Puzzles and Gameplay
My Hero One’s Justice definitely leans into the Quirks of My Hero Academia by making each playable character based around their own respective Quirks. However, it’s something the series could dive even further into, actually giving you specific tasks or objectives that can only be done by certain heroes.
Hopefully, in the future of My Hero Academia games we see the series break out of the fighting game mold, allowing for more flexibility with gameplay. Through this, you could use a team of heroes to explore environments and solve puzzles. Use Todoroi’s hot and cold to affect the temperature of things, Bakugo’s explosions to blow things up, or Uraraka’s gravity to make things float. One’s Justice definitely sets the stage for using Quirks as fighting powers, and it feels like there’s so much more you could do with it. It’d be great to see Midoriya and Bakugo join Jump Force with destructive power or some other kind of crossover. One thing’s for certain, any future My Hero games will have to really lean into Quirks, it’s what makes the series so unique.
Features Future My Hero Academia Games Need to Have
Original Characters/Story and Character Creation
In the past, we’ve talked about the big problem anime games have, where they desperately stick to the main story of the source material, refusing to deviate from it. My Hero One’s Justice is the perfect example of this, with a story mode that feels like the briefest of recaps you could possibly imagine.
Games like Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise and One Piece: World Seeker are looking to rectify this problem by creating bold new stories in their universes, that still use the core tenets of their source material. The world of My Hero Academia is incredibly rich and there are a ton of side characters we see pop up all the time, whether they’re students at U.A., professional heroes, or small-time villains. With such a wide array of possibilities, it’d be easy to tell an original story in the world of My Hero Academia. You could have it focus on a small-time professional hero just starting to get his footing in the industry, or maybe even a small-time villain.
Of course, one option that’d absolutely delight fans is character creation. Being able to create your own U.A. student or hero would be an absolute blast, and you could choose from a set stable of different Quirks. This could also tie into the school setting we talked about earlier, as maybe you play as your own original character making their way into Freshman year at U.A., meeting Class 1-A and others along the way.
We’ve already seen the potential side stories have with the fantastic Vigilantes manga, and there’s no reason a My Hero Academia game couldn’t have the same quality.
Features Future My Hero Academia Games Need to Have
Moral Choices
More than most superhero series, My Hero Academia likes to play with the ideas of heroes and villains. The villains of My Hero Academia generally have motives that make sense, even if they’re not admirable. Like the Hero-Killer Stain, for example, who wants to rid the world of “pretend” heroes that have sullied the name of heroes by turning it into a flashy publicity-based job. He wants the world to return to a time where heroes were rightfully idolized, and had the skills to back it up. Stain may not be doing good things but you can understand his motives, and that’s just part of what makes him one of the series’ more memorable villains.
Playing with moral choice is something a My Hero Academia game could easily do, even forcing you to choose with heroes or villains in the end. Do you want to protect a peaceful life and become a beacon of justice? Or do you want to upset the status quo and start a revolution? My Hero Academia is the perfect anime series for a game with moral choices, and that’s something only a video game could deliver. It doesn’t have to be a big sweeping RPG, but it could be. There are a lot of options for how to implement moral choice, and it’s something virtually unseen in anime video games. But anime games need to try new things, they need to advance.
My Hero Academia has already broken so many tropes of anime, so maybe it’ll be the series to do something new with anime games as well. Future games will, at least, need to be more ambitious than My Hero One’s Justice in order to do that.
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