My Hero Academia Review

For its first hundred chapters this is one of the best shonen manga of its decade. Horikoshi draws with a clarity and energy that owes as much to American comics as to Japanese ones, the school setting gives the enormous cast room to grow, and the villains, particularly Shigaraki and Stain, are written with a point of view rather than just a power. The tournament and the training camp arcs are the genre at its best.

The decline is gradual and then sudden. The war arcs that dominate the back half trade the school structure for an endless escalating battle, the cast becomes too large to serve, and the final confrontation with All For One resolves through power escalation rather than character. The ending itself is soft where it needed to be sharp. It is graded a B for a run that would have been an A at three hundred chapters and that kept going to four hundred and thirty.