By Dustin Cabeal

If you’ve listened to our anime podcast Super S – Anime Podcast or read any of my past anime or manga reviews for My Hero Academia, then you know that I’m not hyped on this anime. It came just after One-Punch Man, and so the expectation was that it would be handled with the same level of care as OPM. It wasn’t. The first season was not brilliant and frankly dragged in all the wrong places, while rushing its way to the ending.

I sat down and watched the first four episodes of the second season of My Hero Academia. I, of course, will only be reviewing the second to fourth episode since we have a review of the first episode, but be sure to read Shanel’s review for her take on the season as well. The thing that stood out to me the most was that even though each episode was 24 minutes long, it felt like fifteen.

This was largely because I was able to skip the extensively long explanation of the world and quirks, plus the opening song that was just as terrible as the first season. Then they started to include elements of the previous episode recut in a different order which was very annoying and took off close to five minutes of the episode. I fell for it once, but I was able to fast forward through it the next two times. We’re five minutes down and only nineteen minutes left of the show already. But, wait, there’s more he said like an info-commercial salesman. The ending song is four minutes long… the show may be 24 minutes long, but in actuality, the new footage only amounts to fifteen fucking minutes.

With this being the case the pacing of the show is terrible. Very little can happen and it amounts to almost the same amount as a manga chapter which is pathetic really. Add in that there’s a lot of filler shots of other characters training or pumping a fist randomly and it just never finds a rhythm. Even watching four episodes in a row, I didn’t find myself coming back out of joy, but rather just hoping that I would get enough content to be satisfied.

I never did. It’s the equivalent of reading the series weekly, but sitting through a lot of filler in addition to it and that’s just not fun. The story itself is pretty weak at the moment. I remember feeling the same while reading it, it’s the series catching its breath, but it never pops like you’d hope it would. The students are being pitted against each other, and it’s not until the third challenge that this segment of the series gets interesting.

Midoriya is still too much of a crier in the anime; it’s so much worse than the manga because it just feels constant. Even fucking All Might tells him twice not to cry so much, which is just a terrible bit of meta humor. There’s at least some attempt to introduce more of the class, but some of their skills are currently “meh” because we haven’t seen any heroic use for the. There’s a lot of practical skills show, but not necessarily heroic skills.

If you haven’t watched the anime, which seems unlikely, then don’t, especially if you’re enjoying the manga. I may be in the minority here on the love of this anime, but I doubt I’m the only one that feels that the manga is much better and well worth the investment of time, unlike this second season which has only aired an hour of footage after four episodes. Before I go, the animation is much better this time, but it should be when they’re reusing so much footage.

Score: 2/5

My Hero Academia E.015-017