English Dub Season Review: My Hero Academia Season Seven

Overview:

Following an all-out battle with the Paranormal Liberation Front, it is difficult for the people of Japan to continue placing faith in their heroes. To combat the combined power of Tomura Shigaraki and All For One, All Might calls for his ally from the West—the strongest woman on the planet, Star and Stripe.

Our Take:

While going back through this season in preparation for this review I was reminded about Star and Stripe or as I like to call her “unrealized potential”. Star and Stripe has such a cool design and unique power that I was hoping she would be a huge part of the finale of the series. While that might not have ended up being the case you can’t say she wasn’t impactful. She managed to cause a lot of lasting damage to Shigaraki which might be the edge Deku needs to defeat him.

One of the other things that was mildly frustrating about this season was the four recap episodes that started the season. It wouldn’t have been quite as big an issue if those episodes didn’t count towards the total episode count. Normally, we get twenty-five episodes in a two-cour My Hero Academia season but since we had those four recaps we only got twenty-one. That made my disdain for recap episodes even higher.

My only other nitpick about this season was how it ended. I know cliffhangers are nothing new to TV or anime in particular but this season ended at the worst spot possible. I have a feeling the studio knew exactly where they wanted to end this season and that’s part of why they did as many recap episodes as they did but still, I can see some fans being frustrated with this ending.

Studio Bones still showed they are one of the best animation studios around with how they animate the fight scenes for this series. Say what you will about everything else for this show, the visuals are pleasing to look at the very least.

The next season will be the last one and that will be a bittersweet moment. My Hero Academia has been a part of my anime-watching experience for almost ten years and it will be weird for it to be over. I wonder if it will get some sort of sequel series like we got with Dragonball and Naruto. Either way, I look forward to what the final season brings. There were a lot of highs and a lot of lows but ultimately it was still an enjoyable season.