Introduction

The second season of Boku no Hero Academia is – sadly – a rare example of a sequel improving upon its predecessor. I really enjoyed the first season and I entered the second with high expectations which were exceeded, for the first time ever.

When I first watched this season, I realized that this was the season that made Boku no Hero Academia what it is; it demonstrated exactly how much effort was put into the franchise, how clean the plot was, how detailed all the characters were, and how entertaining it still was to sit down once in a while and watch some a simple battle shounen anime.

This season takes the features of the first season that were great and ramped them up to the next level. There are a few rocky components; despite all that’s good with this season, it’s definitely not a masterpiece, but I’m definitely satisfied with my experience having watched it, and I have a lot to say about it.

This season originally aired between April and October of 2017, and was originally produced by Studio Bones, just like the original. It currently enjoys an 8.57 rating on MyAnimeList.com, the highest rating for any Boku no Hero Academia season, and marginally higher than the first season.

I agree with this rating passionately, for reasons that will be made clear below. Spoiler alert, I’ll be discussing a lot of major plot points throughout the review, just to make sense of things, so I recommend that you actually watch the series before reading this review.

The element of surprise is a key factor in forming emotional responses, so true investment in this series requires low foreknowledge of events.

Story and Plot

The second season of Boku no Hero Academia picks up right where the first left off, the middle of the school year, with Midoriya and his classmates slowly recovering from the USJ incident at the end of the last season.

The pacing of the events in this season is excellent; almost no time is wasted throughout the entire season, with the show jumping right into the first of its three arcs within the first episode.

The first arc is a tournament arc, with all of the students of UA participating in a sports festival - basically a glorified excuse to have all of the characters participate in a bunch of minigames with a tournament at the end.

Somewhere around the middle I began to feel like the entire arc was artificial, as though it was created with the sole purpose of giving the different characters the opportunity to take it out on each other and fight, but it really makes up for that when the action starts to kick in.

As usual for Boku no Hero Academia we get to experience great creativity in the fight scenes and challenges, which is really a requirement for Midoriya, what with the double-edged nature of his quirk at this point.

Most other battle shounen at this point would have the protagonist surpass his limits with the “Power of Emotion” or some other cheap tactic, but Boku no Hero Academia keeps things firmly grounded, reminding us how far Midoriya is behind his classmates as he runs around during the obstacle course while powerhouses like Todoroki and Bakugou tear it up with their quirks.

However, where the Sports Festival Arc really shines is in the final tournament, where the top-scoring members of the previous qualify fight to determine who the greatest hero in the year is.

It’s really enough to say that the fight choreography and design are spectacular, as well as the intentional pairings have taken for the initial draw in the tournament. However, besides that, what makes the tournament so special is that it’s more than a physical battle.

It’s really a battle of wills, as the different characters are put into the same crucible with only the strength of their will and their drive to augment their Quirks, most of which often are horribly inadequate.

The entire arc also gives us insight into a slightly larger universe than Class 1-A, which the first season exposed us to, showing us the different backgrounds Midoriya’s classmates have and how much they all want to be heroes, as well as all the players in Class 1-B.

This gives us a great opportunity to learn about all the different Quirks that are present in society as well as the possibilities for performance elsewhere, and it eventually brings up a lot of interesting questions about the fairness of the hero society, the entire hierarchy of heroes, and the unfair distribution of quirks at birth. There is quite a bit I'd like to say about Todorokim, which I will delve into when discussing the characters.

My only other complaint about the Sports Festival Arc, besides the possible artificiality of the concept, is a stylistic choice about the composition of the different episodes. Throughout this arc, I really felt as though a lot of runtimes were being spent on the recap.

This drops significantly later on, but throughout the majority of this arc, usually the entire cold open as well as a few minutes after the OP was spent either recapping the previous episode or recalling significant events characters’ history.

Normally this isn’t a bad thing; there were a lot of occasions throughout the season where flashbacks were utilized perfectly, like Midoriya’s flashbacking to Bakugou’s rant about how strong Todoroki was back in the first season one, just before Bakugou and Todoroki’s fight in the tournament, but the effect in the first couple of episodes was just annoyance and frustration.

Sometimes it’s better, stylistically, not to spoon-feed your audience content and let them figure things out on their own. It makes the satisfaction from understanding the characters that much greater.

On my rewatch, I fully expected things to drop a little once the Sports Festival Arc had concluded, but I was pleasantly surprised with how effective both the Internship and Final Exam Arcs were at keeping up the story.

They definitely felt more organic than the Sports Festival, and the internship introduced us to probably the coolest weapon in the series: Midoriya’s One for All Full Cowling, and his slow gain of mastery of his power.

The fight with Stain was also an incredible piece of choreography and served to show the growing bond between Midoriya and Todoroki, as well as how Todoroki was dealing with the fallout from his battle with Midoriya.

There’s Stain’s incredible ideology. If anything, this season begins to poke holes in the world it so scrupulously built in the first season, showing us the flaws in the hierarchy of competing heroes that we’d all gotten so used to and enjoyed from the first season.

Stain’s entire ideology throws all that on its head and asks the real questions, giving fantastic opportunities for Iida’s character to grow, as well as to spur the growth of the League of Villains for later seasons’ activities.

The pace was definitely a bit slower during this arc, but it was more satisfying than the previous one. The occasional filler episodes went a long way towards fleshing out the supporting cast a bit more, as well as providing necessary breathers between intense emotional events.

As important as Midoriya and his close friends are, watching Kirishima and Tetsutetsu picking up trash and Uraraka learning to judo-flip an adversary were equally satisfying. This is also where I felt like the recap problems were fixed up a little, with a lot of adjustments being made to how much content was in each episode, and just how much time was devoted to each event.

The Final Exams arc was definitely the shortest of the three and it definitely didn’t have as strong an effect as the previous two, but I appreciate it for reminding us that Midoriya and his classmates were still at school.

To be frank, the practical exam definitely had a lot of issues, and this is where I’m beginning to notice an issue that becomes much clearer in the third season, but just like the Internship episodes where we got to watch the supporting cast, watching all the different characters work in unique pairs together and overcome some of their own problems was really satisfying.

I especially enjoyed Jiro and Koda’s fight against Present Mic; Boku no Hero Academia’s creativity really shines in situations where the combatants are at a severe disadvantage but find some intelligent way to get the edge over their opponent.

Obviously Midoriya and Bakugou’s battle against Evil All Might (by far the scariest villain in the show) takes the cake, but Bakugou’s character development is nowhere on the same scale as that of Todoroki or Midoriya throughout the season.

The fight itself was enjoyable and creative, but it definitely felt to me as though the studio was running out of time and needed to end the season; the fights were definitely a bit rushed, and the Bakugou I have in my head is still seething about how brief the fight was and how little we got to see his character crushed and reformed.