Behind the Design: Endeavor

Hi there! I’m Clint from the UVS Games design team, and I lead the design for Endeavor’s cards in Jet Burn. I’m here today to talk with you about how we transitioned our new #1 hero from the anime into UniVersus!

Endeavor has grown as a character since his last story appearance in Crimson Rampage, in more ways than just 1 health! Endeavor has gained a strong grasp of his Quirk’s limitations, and has to learn to push himself right to the limit of overheating without passing out from exhaustion. We interpreted this into UniVersus by presenting Endeavor’s heat as his deck. After a bit of burning through your deck, Endeavor will receive a noticeable boost in power for the remainder of the game. You will want to leverage your remaining time to be able to push through a win before heating up too much!

When we set out to design the new #1 hero, we had a few goals in mind for him.

1. We wanted to capture his dramatic season finale fight with Hood

2. As the new #1, Endeavor3 should be the new face of the self-mill mechanic

3. He should feel like he is on a timer which can be shortened by the player’s aggression.

Endeavor’s new kit is based on his climactic season 4 finale fight against Hood, and emulates his struggle with his own limits alongside the determination to defeat Hood. In this fight Endeavor uses multiple variants of his iconic Flashfire Fist, so this character playing well with the Flashfire Fist rare attack from League of Villains had to be a goal! One of the ways we achieved this was through designing his kit as though the original Flashfire Fist was a part of his kit from the onset.

Endeavor’s block allocation is different from each other character in the set because of this. The 11 other attack kits in this set all have 2 mid blocks, 1 high block, and 1 low block, but not here. Endeavor was originally planned to have two attacks that combo off of a high block, as well as two high blocks in his kit on top of the original Flashfire Fist having a high block. This allows the player to choose their opener attack from Flashfire Fist, PLUS ULTRA: Prominence Burn, or Flashfire Fist: Hell Spider and still be able to play out combos afterwards. PLUS ULTRA: Prominence Burn is best saved for later in the game, Flashfire Fist is an excellent early game card, and Flashfire Fist: Hell Spider is aimed more at the mid-game than the other two. Through testing, Endeavor eventually went down to only having one Combo High Block attack in his kit, but the throughline does still remain.

Flashfire Fist: Jet Burn originally was intended to be a string ender for Endeavor, coming in at a large 7 damage near the end of the turn to take a large chunk out of your opponent. We learned that he needed that less than he needed something earlier in the turn, and he especially wanted a way to keep burning through his deck.

As you can see with the final version of Flashfire Fist: Jet Burn, it ended up with the same stats that it started playtest with, but ended up with a greatly different role. The printed version of this card now wants to be played second, maybe even first in your string to allow you to burn through your deck on each attack you play. This opened synergies with PLUS ULTRA: Prominence Burn and Endeavor’s secret rare, Fiery Vengeance, and makes the card simply more appealing for Endeavor as a package.

I hope you enjoyed our behind the scenes look into Endeavor’s development, and when playing him in the future, don’t be afraid to go beyond PLUS ULTRA!