long time readers might be questioning why i'm revisiting a game i didn't even give a full page to, one most of you who even did read my coverage of it probably forgot about. well, it's been my most played game pretty much ever since i covered it and it's continued to update and improve massively since launch and i've been playing it almost every day since, it's really fun and time has only helped the game be even better than when it launched, with some great new characters, a cool new map and a bunch of nice smaller changes since then and i'd like to try and sell some people on it. it's some of the most fun you can have with an anime game right now.

the biggest change since launch is the new map, while the original was a like, big testing ground and had a bunch of varied but disconnected areas like destroyed cities or mountains, the new map is a huge city with areas that make sense to be there, the school, the beach deku cleans in the show, a mall and a shopping district, even a huge river and a destroyed city near the bottom of the map and it's just as good as the first map, even better in some ways, it looks a ton better and it has a lot more detail and eastereggs hidden in it, plus the fights here feel extra chaotic with the worse sightlines, it's a great new addition and it keeps it super fresh since they swap out every 2 hours in the modes a little like splatoon. the original map has changed a little though, where the mountain area before was a little meh to fight on because it felt too elevated and big, now it's been flattened a bit and the tunnels massively expanded, it's a big improvement, though i would like to see the old one come back as an option in at least unranked modes. i do hope we get some new maps soon though, while they are super varied a new one does feel a little needed, maybe a theme park or something. there was also one new mode with the solos mode, but i haven't played too much of it, i'll get into why later but i find the team mode to be tons more fun.

the new characters are also a big deal, though none of them have became my full time main, i still main denki for his stuns (but he was given a huge buff by having a second dash now and a longer range on his bolts) and dabi bc i think he's hot, his self revive and homing attack is cool too but i just have a type, you know, but anyway i did play around with the new characters a bunch. the main one i've played of them was all for one, he's HUGE and his main gimmicks are ability stealing on downed enemies, a super damaging charge ranged attack that can two shot your shields and a teleport where he can teleport enemies inside his range for a combo with his stun or outside his range to help give him defence, he's super fun especially on town where you can teleport people from other floors and buildings into his stun, it's so fun to use. twice was another i played some of and his whole thing is duplication, he can have a bunch of ai clones of himself and others running around and causing chaos and it's super useful, he also has really good mobility and a nice ranged attack too, he's powerful but a little hard to use. eraserhead is here too and he's for sure one of the more fun characters, he can disable enemy abilities making him almost a support even though he's not in the catagory, he has some stuns and a really cool ranged kick that can be great for mobility, difficult to use but so fun once you get his moveset down. there was also endevour added who's main focus is on damage over time attacks, he has a stream ranged attack and some rly cool stuff you can use for area denial but i think he's too hard for me to get much use out of. the newest new character is mirio who has intangibility and can walk through enemies, the floor and walls, it's super neat!, he even gets a shield (the best in the game) and a really good dashkick thats amazing for mobility, i don't have him yet though, same with endevour. they also added alternate quirk sets for the characters but this one i'm more torn on, while you can try characters for free a few times a day, you can't do the same with these quirk sets and that sucks, the only one i've been able to play around with much is bakugo's, which is a speed and movement focused one with a shotgun style attack, a dive bomb and a really cool carpet bomb attack thats so fun to use. deku's alt gives him some more movility with a dive kick that messes up the level terrain and thats cool, but not one i'm all that into and shigaraki is.... broken. his alt gives you calamaty and it does amazing damage, its huge area denial damage that can be spammed to death and going up againt him alone is basically a death sentance, i once saw one go 10 kills in a match (theres only 21 other players outside your team), i will get him one day.

so now that you know what all is new, why should you play, well for two main reasons i think, well, three. for one it's free, you have nothing to lose here by at least giving it a try, you can even try out the whole cast for free. for two is the fact i think it fixes the big issue i've always had with battle royale games, it's pace. the pace here is very fast, from the first minute you have goals and things to do, you aren't sitting paranoid in a house for 5 mins or searching for 10 just to find one person and get one shot, fights give you much more of a chance and you're always looking for new items to level up your abilities, give you temp stat boosts or get healing, there's little sub ubjectives to help your team like finding kota or the larger item boxes that spawn at intervals, hell, with how small the maps are you may even start the game with a fight right off the bat, there's downtime for sure, but its never too long and you're always super close to getting into a fight if you want to and neither focusing on resources or kills puts you at a disadvantage, plus matches only last maybe 10 mins so you can be quick in and out. the other reason is the combat, this has some of the best combat in an anime game, it's not as deep as like an arcsys game but it's got some individual character depth and a ton of variety with all the characters to play as, you can even play as a support if you want with characters focused on shielding or reviving, the mindgames can be super fun especially with characters like dabi and his self revive and when you do get into a big team fight it's chaos in the best way, abilities flying everywhere, supports trying to mitigate it, people scrambling to heal, it feels like the best representation of a big shonen fight i've ever seen in a game and it's a real specticle when it happens, when you get down to that last circle with more than 2 teams it's so fun, everyone throwing around abilities and destroying chunks of the map, it's something really special. it's got not too bad a learning curve too, it won't take you a ton of time to learn it but the skill cieling is very high for if you do get into it, you even have bot modes for training!

normally i'd just do a simple reccomendation to play this but here i'm not quite going to do that, instead i'm *begging you* to give this one a try, i do usually expect people to read my stuff and try a game here or there that makes them interested, that's the intent here, it's not for people to read and take this opinion as their own and repeat it on the internet, these aren't subtitutes for experiancing these works and i do hope people play some of what they read about here, they're reccomendation pieces to help people figure out if they might like something and in this case i ask you to *please* consider trying this one, it's free and on most platforms so its super accessable and it's really fun, one of my favourite licenced games in years and honestly some of the most fun i've had in games this and last gen, it's super easy to write it off based on the idea and licence as just being a quick cashgrab, even i wrote it off like that, but it's really fun and it does a lot of cool things really well, if you don't take to it then thats cool, but it's worth at least giving an earnest try with, you might really like it.