[Note: You should definitely watch up to the end of Season 3 before watching this. I heard people say you should watch up to mid Season 4, but the movie only marginally makes note of something in that for a few seconds. Technically you could watch this without experiencing My Hero Academia at all and still be fine, but finishing Season 3 is my recommendation.]

Heroes Rising starts with a fun plot that then evolves into something cool before reaching the climax that’s crazy, for better or for worse. It focuses on Class 1-A doing some errands for a relatively small island that they’re stationed at to get some hero work experience, which is a new scenario that's delightful to see. Then comes the conflict, which requires the whole class to help resolve. Characters you’d expect to get more screentime still do, but it was fun to see everyone finding a way to help regardless. That’s the main strength of this movie: seeing the whole class work together without any help from adults, and that’s why I liked it a lot. The islanders are pleasant as well, with the most important of them, Katsuma, being absolutely adorable.

The movie doesn’t come without some flaws, though. The overall motive of the antagonists is so bland I could almost taste tofu. For the bad guys themselves, one’s a chimera man who’s amazing, one’s a woman who was surprisingly underutilized, one I almost forgot about, and their leader is redundant with a villain we’ve seen before (combined with his lame motive, this means his design is all he has going for him). Granted, some of the leader's moves are neat, but I got bored of constant shields real quick. Thankfully, what they actually do in the movie allows Class 1-A to shine as a team, so they could be worse.

My main gripe boils down to the writers feeling the need to make the climax as epic as possible. This nips it in the bud for two reasons. First, it would’ve been infinitely more satisfying to have it end at a certain point. Instead, the Big Bad nonsensically powers up, which just completely erased his whole weakness with no good explanation. This leads into the second problem: the craziness the heroes do to combat that doesn’t work in a non-canon movie, ESPECIALLY when you already know it’s non-canon. Granted, I tried to ignore that and enjoy the sheer wildness of it. It kinda worked for some parts, but in general I’m not a fan of fights that exist purely for spectacle like that. It reminded me of the first movie’s final fight, which makes me think they feel the need to make it so grandiose because it’s a movie…but they really don’t.

(It’s more of a nitpick, but another thing that bothered me was them repeatedly highlighting Midoria and Bakugo saying they did things “to save people” and “to win” respectively (oftentimes using those words specifically). On top of that, the little brother calling out to Deku exclusively and the sister calling to Bakugo exclusively. It was just…weird…)

Regardless of my gripes with the villains and climax, I liked it a lot for its interesting plot and Class 1-A’s abilities and interactions getting a spotlight as they help each other out. If you like the anime/manga, which you probably do, then this is a great little bonus story.