One Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows - Character Pass

My honest reaction to the One Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows Character Pass is that it's impossible to evaluate without first being straight about what you're buying into. The base game is a 3-on-3 arena fighter where you create a custom hero, grind missions, climb the Hero Association ranks from Class C upward, and unlock Battle Styles and Killer Moves by bonding with canon characters. The pass adds four fighters to that roster: Suiryu, a martial arts champion who uses the Void Fist; Lightning Max, a Class A hero whose explosive shoe-mounted kicks define his whole moveset; Watchdog Man, the S-class enigma who fights on all fours and has barely been shown in the anime; and Garou, the self-styled Hero Hunter who serves as the standout pick and comes with his own original story. Each of the four packs includes a dedicated story chapter, which is a meaningful addition over a bare character drop. The problem is the foundation. The base game landed with mixed reception at launch and the criticisms have not aged away. Combat has been widely described as janky, with awkward input response and a tendency to reward whoever lands the first hit rather than who plays better. The Hero Arrival System, where Saitama enters late as a functionally invincible tag partner, is a clever design solution to a very real lore problem, but it also introduces random stage events like meteor showers that most players found more disruptive than fun. Add stun-lock issues and slow get-up animation to the pile, and you have a fighting system that feels unfinished regardless of which characters you queue up. More fighters do not patch that. Where the pass does earn some goodwill is in roster variety. Garou is the character most fans wanted, and his martial arts kit is meaningfully different from the standard punch-kick template. Watchdog Man's all-fours fighting style is at minimum a curiosity, and any character that had almost no screen time in the source material is a genuine question mark in terms of moveset, which makes him arguably the most interesting experimental pick. Suiryu's Void Fist gives the pass a clean tournament-fighter archetype that the base roster was missing. If the four additions were just reskins of existing fighters, this would be a hard pass. They are not quite that. One very important practical note: the online lobby functionality shut down in early 2022. You are buying these characters for offline play and local versus. The game was already criticized for thin online content before that shutdown; now that pillar is completely gone. Anyone who was planning to main these characters in competitive online play should know that ship has sailed. The pass still functions for the adventure mode, solo versus, and local head-to-head, so if offline is your lane, nothing is technically broken. The Character Pass only makes sense if you already own and genuinely enjoy the base game's loop despite its roughness, and you want more faces to throw into the roster. Garou alone justifies the curiosity for serious OPM fans. For anyone still on the fence about the base game, sort that question out first. This add-on will not fix what you might not like.

Alex · Scout Team

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