My Review Academia S5 E22: Parade

This whole arc is gonna feel rushed like this, isn’t it? I mean, we’re two episodes in and we’re already nearing the climax!

The battle against the Metahuman Liberation Army and the League of Villains continues. An ambushed Twice struggles with the ghosts of his past as his foes attempt to kill Toga. Meanwhile, Shigurake and Spinner make their way towards the tower and Dabi’s battle against the ice user continues.

Ignoring the fact that it feels like they crammed five to ten chapters into this one episode, we’ve got some fairly strong narrative stuff here. We get to dive further into Twice’s backstory, learning how he got to the point of snapping, which culminates in him completing his character arc, which is pretty satisfying and badass. Plus, it gives some more emotional weight to the relationship between Twice and Giran.

The episode also leaves off on a pretty rad cliffhanger. Gigantomachia is on the move (how did he end up falling asleep underground?), the tower is brought down and Shigurake is ready to square-off against Re-Destro. It still feels like it needs to slow the hell down a bit, but it was an exciting way to end the episode.

Presentation wise, this episode is very up and down. We get plenty of colored manga pages and some rough animation. But there’s an equal amount of really cool stuff, too! The brief battle between Re-Destro and Copy-Shigurake looks pretty cool and the animation at the end is sick. But everything up until that point can look pretty rough.

That’s… about it, really. It’s a decent episode with some cool narrative beats. Unfortunately, the pacing is just way too fast and the animation is anything but consistent.

Hopefully, the arc will end on a bang. MHA seasons have always ended on a banger, so I hope they can keep that up.