English Dub Review: My Hero Academia “Special Episode: Save the World with Love!”

Well, this was unexpected.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

This week, My Hero Academia takes a sabbatical from its normal episode showing. It’s side story time, and this particular tale takes us back before the Summer Camp arc, to a previously unmentioned special training with Midoriya, Bakugou, Todoroki, Tsuyu, and Uraraka. Aizawa presents them with something a little different than what they’re used to: a hostage situation.

After Todoroki and Uraraka maneuver to try and scope out the scene better, Bakugou gets fed up with waiting and rushes into the scene guns blazing. After he explodes into the jewelry store where the hostages are taken prisoner, the Class 1-A heroes are shocked to see the villain (Played by All Might) dead on the ground with a knife in his chest. They realize that this hostage situation has just turned into a murder mystery.

The team goes through a serious of deductions to try and figure out what happened, and though they consider several different routes for how this might have gone down, Midoriya comes to the conclusion that it must have been the hostage being played by Midnight, who was helping out with the training. With her identity as the murderer revealed, Aizawa stops the training but reveals that even though Midoriya figured out the line of thinking they were going for, they all fail because they didn’t realize the villain was never dead in the first place. They had been so preoccupied with solving the murder that they didn’t tie up the villain, who has now run off to his freedom. Midoriya and the others are dumbfounded, to say the least.

As the episode closes, we see All Might get an e-mail from the daughter of an old American hero friend of his, inviting him to come out and say hi. This trip would take him to I-island, a technologically advanced island created to advance hero research and support items. All Might is keen to go, but not before inviting Midoriya, who is more than happy to follow his hero on this adventure that will take place during the My Hero Academia movie.

Our Take:

Well, this episode is about as filler as filler can be. If you were hoping to continue witnessing Class 1-A’s licensing exam, I’ve got some bad news for you: looks like you’re going to have to wait another week. This episode is explicitly here to put some butts in seats for the new My Hero Academia movie coming out soon. (Which we’ll be reviewing on this site, FYI) But, thankfully, that doesn’t mean the show cheaps out on making a “Very special episode.” I’m happy to say that even though it’s unexpected, this is still a quality episode. Its fun to watch and a nice setup for the movie, which is apparently going to be semi-canonical and tied into the main story.

The setup this week puts our heroes in a challenging new environment: a hostage situation. I always like it when there are conflicts in a shounen that can’t be solved just by fighting; they keep things spicy. The conflict starts hot with Bakugou getting in the way of his fellow heroes’ plans but quickly takes a sharp turn when this simple hostage situation turns into a murder. I honestly didn’t see that coming, and bringing that kind of extra twist into the story is just the kind of quality storytelling I expect from My Hero Academia. Not to mention, being a hero isn’t always such a clear cut job; sometimes judging a situation is sometimes a battle in its own right.

My Hero Academia really likes to put a lot of exposition into its dialogue, but that actually works to the show’s advantage here. Midoriya and friends talk us, the audience, through the story, with enough thoroughness that we’re able to keep up with all the craziness that’s going on. It takes us through this episode like an episode of Phoenix Wright, giving us a mystery that captures the eye and reaches a satisfying, if not somewhat hilarious, ending.

I do wish that we got to see how things were going in the Provisional License Exam, but for what it is, this is a solid side story from start to finish. Sometimes, the unexpected can really take you by surprise. In addition to being a good story, this episode also gets me pretty hyped up for the movie, so it looks like it succeeded on both fronts. We can wait one more week for the main story, but for now, this is a nice little thing to enjoy.