As before, Hero Academia splits its season into two halves. The first half involves a reprieve in the form of Class A and Class B competing against teams of each other. The second half moves the plot forward once again — the class is split up into hero internships again and there’s a return to the League of Villains. To put it bluntly, the first half is an absolutely miserable experience before the second half steers the show back on-course.

People might inherently not like the training/friendly competition parts of shonen anime, but I do. For a show like Hero Academia, I’m mostly here for the characters interacting and seeing how many scenarios their quirks can work in. But this season does it so poorly. The most obvious annoyance is the constant recapping. Hero Academia is no stranger to copious recapping and flashbacks, but this this time it’s actually ridiculous. While not true all the time, flashbacks in previous seasons would accompany dialogue and bolster it. In the first half of Season 5, I swear that half of the runtime felt like flashbacks. It’s impossible to ignore how much time is wasted on them for no reason. Hell, a lot of them flashback to a moment that happened 5 minutes beforehand.

Then a quarter of the first half was characters explaining what was happening on the screen and subsequently overpraising other characters. It’s the cardinal sin of showing and not telling, but how it was done here felt especially condescending. It’s the most childish Hero Academia has ever felt.

The rest of the first half is actual fighting. The problem is that Class A doesn’t do much interesting with their quirks/interactions and Class B’s quirks are generally too weird to get invested in. Midoriya’s big One For All upgrade — which I’m not sure if I like yet — and Bakugo’s behavior felt like the only things worth seeing. It feels weird to say this, but I think I might recommend reading episode synopses for the first half. That way you know what Class B’s quirks are and what the generally happened. Anything that isn’t in a synopsis is either an annoying flashback you don’t need or a joke that falls flat.

As an aside, Hotoshi Shinso (the Brainwasher) also comes back for some spotlight. This gave me some hope that his quirk would be explored more, but he’s pretty irrelevant.

The second half of the Season is your standard fare of Hero Academia. It still has a lot of unnecessary flashbacks, but they’re less distracting. If you made it this far into the series, I imagine you’ll enjoy this half since it starts building up the next arc in the plot. Endeavor gets the spotlight…which sounds worrying but I don’t think it’s handled too badly. Then the League of Villains take over the show as we get several episode to see what they’ve been up to. The League of Villains has only been mildly interesting for me thus far, but I think this season finale started making me care about a good handful of them. This new information on them and their pasts would’ve been nice to have earlier so I could’ve started caring about them sooner, but I don’t think it’s TOO late. The resolution felt forced though.

Overall, the first half wasn’t even worth watching at best and downright shook my faith in the series at worst. It’s a shame because it was really Class B’s time to shine when they needed it, but it let them down hard in my eyes. The second half proved that it was a temporary plunge, but it wasn’t enough to offset the bad taste in my mouth. And since it was more buildup than anything, it leaves the season feeling like it has little substance.