English Dub Review: My Hero Academia “School Festival”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

It’s time to get ready for the school’s annual festival, although this year it will only really be open to students and staff and give the less appreciated classes more focus. Everyone’s got an idea on what to do, though some ideas are rejected right off the bat. But eventually, the idea comes up about Jiro doing a concert with her instruments and musical prowess, which she relents to.

The next day, Deku and Togata visit Eri in the hospital and decide to invite her to the festival. Meanwhile, the social media conscious villain Gentle Criminal and his sidekick La Brava emerge with a video showing off their recent exploits at a convenience store, concerning law enforcement, but he also wants to make a bigger impact.

OUR TAKE

Okay, did anyone else not caught up with the manga think that Gentle on the computer looked kind of like Nine from the new movie for a second? When I first saw that, I honestly thought they were going to try and work in a tie-in to the movie to give us an idea of where that story takes place but…yeah, I guess not, since apparently Heroes Rising could take place as late as post Season 5? Either way, it’s certainly something that’s been on my mind since seeing the movie.

And it arguably provides more to talk about than this episode does, since it pretty much just provides the starting up of this School Festival arc and establishes Gentle Criminal and La Brava as its likely antagonists. It’s certainly nice to get a breather after the intensity of the Overhaul arc, especially since we’ll be able to see Eri get more of a chance to be in society without feeling like she’s going to die or get someone hurt at any given moment, not to mention getting Togata out in the world again after his recovery. Plus we’ll get more focus on Jiro, it seems, which is cool because she’s definitely one of the more interesting characters who just hasn’t had a ton of focus, which makes sense given that her power is kind of limited in combat situations.

Based on the remaining episodes in the season and the amount of chapters in this arc, it does look like this will be what the remainder of the season focuses on, which is a bit bittersweet. As said, we could use a breather after everything that happened, but I would honestly like this season to end on more of an eventful high note, which I don’t exactly expect coming from something as low key as a cultural festival. Then again, I enjoyed the Sports Festival quite a bit (mostly due to the tournament arc) and this arc looks like it will be expanding on the world and industry of being a hero, which I’ve never been let down by learning more about. Heck, I’m not sure that I have felt that this show ever had a bad arc thus far, so even something as seemingly mundane as this could end up being totally satisfactory. But the fact remains that this episode, while having its own good moments, was pretty uneventful on its own, which certainly drags it down a bit.