Six episodes in an the main character is finally doing stuff. Good ol’ shounen anime.
Shortly after awakening, Shigurake makes a beeline for Deku, determined to take One For All for himself. Realizing the danger, Deku puts as much distance between himself and the evacuating civilians, with Bakugo only a step behind him. But now that Shigurake is armed with All For One, will they stand a chance against him?
This was a very strong episode. While it still had a few annoying issues, its strengths more than outshine those weaknesses. It gets pretty intense. At least, when the pacing isn’t dragging.
I love how this episode managed to capture the growing tension and terror Deku is feeling entirely through visuals. He doesn’t have an internal monologue about how he’s putting everyone else in danger. Instead, we just see him looking around, listening to them struggle and panic as he realizes what will happen if he sticks close to them. Combined with the excellent editing and shot composition, it’s a really effective scene.
Unfortunately, that was just about the only time the episode was subtle. Everything else either gets over-explained via monologuing for extensive flashbacks. Sometimes it works just fine, like when Bakugo steels his determination to keep up with Deku. But other times it feels unnecessary, like when Gran Torino explains everything we just saw happen as if we couldn’t figure it out by… you know, watching the episode.
It’s a shounen anime, I don’t know what I was expecting.
Visually speaking, this episode is pretty good. The animation is pretty solid all around. Endeavor pulls out some badass moves against Shigurake, and we even get a cool shot of Deku and Bakugo flying about. It’s pretty sick.
That being said, the first few minutes were pretty rough. The animation was a bit rough and the use of comic book onomatopoeia is a little misplaced. Whose bright idea was it to put big goofy comic book text over Toga murdering a bunch of heroes?
As a whole, this episode is pretty good. It has issues; plenty of stuff is overexplained, the visuals don’t always work, and the over abundance of flashbacks hurts the pacing. But it’s still highly engaging and has some really cool, clever stuff mixed in there. It’s a strong episode.
And now it’s time for characters we actually like to start dying! Yay!
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