One Punch Man, in case you’ve been neglecting your anime viewing of late, is a series about a hero. A hero who never needs more than a single punch to defeat his foes. Which sounds absolutely awesome, until you realise that that’s… a pretty boring life to lead. We’ve already seen the oddball series take manga and anime forms, and now it’s about time for a video game to make an appearance.
Publishers Namco Bandai has announced One Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows — a 3v3 fighter in the vein of Dragon Ball FighterZ or the many, many Naruto games that have been released since the Xbox 360 was the console to own. Only… we’re not especially sure how this one’s going to work. For obvious reasons.
Screw your roster balance
The most obvious reason is that Saitama, the series lead, is ridiculously overpowered. It’s part of One Punch Man lore — he’s a hero that can defeat anyone in a single punch. How do you balance a game with a character like that? Dragon Ball FighterZ managed to equalise all of its fighters as part of the story mode using… quite a gimmick. It doesn’t seem that Namco’s going to be going this route, though.
We don’t know what the gameplay’s actually going to be like, in that case. The snippets of gameplay visible in the launch trailer (above) focus on hero Saitama as well as some of the supporting cast. And Saitama doesn’t seem to be doing much, besides unleashing massive attacks and then just straight-up shrugging off anything launched at his nonplussed face. It looks as though Namco’s going to play this one straight, but we don’t know how that works in practise. Will everyone playing online just be picking the titular character?
It’s going to be some time before we get answers, though. There’s no release date for One Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows, but we do have release platforms. There’s a PC, PS4 and Xbox One version of the game in the works. We’re just going to have to work on our 100 push-ups, 100 sit-ups, 100 squats, and a 10km run, every day, in the meantime.
Source: Namco Bandai (YouTube)