One Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows review: A fun and clever fighter

One Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows is a fun and clever fighter that perfectly encapsulates the bizarre premise of the anime.

Title: One Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows
Developer:Spike Chunsoft
Publisher: Bandai Namco Entertainment
Platforms: PlayStation 4 (version reviewed), Xbox One, PC
Release date: February 28, 2020

2020 has been a big year for anime games with the likes of Dragon Ball Kakarot and My Hero One’s Justice 2. Animes such as these or One Piece or JoJo really lend themselves well to a game but there was one game on the horizon, one name that people couldn’t understand how it would work, One-Punch Man.

One-Punch Man is a very special anime. Heck, it’s the one that got me back into anime after being out since Trigun (not to date myself). While most animes center around characters that are constantly trying to get stronger and always looking for a new challenge, One-Punch Man centers around a protagonist by the name of Saitama, who is so powerful that he can’t be damaged and, as his name implies, can literally defeat anything with a single punch.

Because of this, he’s bored. He shops, he wonders around, he sleeps in and he’s incredibly bored.

So how does this translate to the game One Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows? Turns out, wonderfully.

At the start of the game you create your own character. You pick a gender, design a basic costume, and come up with a hero name. Since my character could NOT take things out with a single punch, I jokingly came up with a dork called “Multipunch”. From there you start off as a low-level member of the Hero Academia with a Class C license.

You fight bank robbers, deliver packages and help people find things they’ve dropped. It’s kind of cute. It actually feels like you started a new job. You’re pretty much invisible to your superiors and you have little freedom. But as you move up you get bigger and cooler missions, other heroes from the anime start to respect you more and you can team up with them on missions.

As you gain the respect of heroes, you learn their fighting styles and their moves. My current character is a martial artist that uses a combination of Mumen Rider and Silverfang’s moves.

Another cool feature is that the game has a large open world city. You can go shopping, explore and encounter characters from the anime. Since the game also has an online mode, you can see other players running around with their characters.

One of the best things is that because of One Punch Man’s goofy aesthetic, no one is taking themselves too seriously. I encountered a jet black person in a suit with a clown nose and an old man in a bathroom with a giant head of hair. You can do what you want. I fought someone online who damn near beat me to death with a keytar.

One Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows went from a bizarre premise to a wonderful expression of freedom. The main joy of One-Punch Man‘s universe is watching the rest of the characters struggle to stick out in a world where someone can just flick a problem away with a single punch. This game captures it wonderfully.

One Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows does have a few flaws though. It occasionally suffers from frame rate issues and a weirdly confusing menu can sometimes be obtuse to navigate. Thankfully, most of the time you’ll be having too much fun to notice the issues.

A copy of this game was provided to App Trigger for the purpose of this review. All scores are ranked out of 10, with .5 increments. Click here to learn more about our Review Policy.