My Hero Academia: World Heroes’ Mission is very similar to the previous two movies. As in, I could sum it up by “pretty good plot up until an asinine climax”. However, this climax didn’t feel stupidly over-the-top enough to offset the rest of the movie, so I think it’s better than Two Heroes. HOWEVER, it still really focuses hard on The Main Three (Midoriya, Bakugo, and Todoroki). I like how Hero Academia at least tries to make all of Class A relevant and you can tell they tried a little here, but the effort falls completely flat and puts it behind Heroes Rising personally.

But most importantly: Do you need to watch Season 5 to watch this? I don’t think so. If you’re planning on watching it already then obviously do that first, but it follows the movies’ trend on being non-canon more than enough. Midoriya has a new One For All move that’s introduced in the first half of Season 5, but the movie doesn’t necessarily highlight it in a way that would leave you confused. Todoroki also has some new moves, but I doubt you’d even notice.

I’m torn on the movie’s antagonist group: Humarise. On one hand, their scariness is shown off very well right off the bat thanks to a pretty gruesome scene. Their belief that quirks will become so convoluted that they’ll become a real problem is in-line with how the series looks at the nature of heroes from alternate perspectives — which you may or may not like. In this case, I think the base idea is worth looking into…but the movie instead focuses more on the very extreme “genocide” part of their plan.

The weirdest part about Humarise is how their influence is never properly explained. Normally this isn’t a problem, but the majority of the movie’s plot — Deku and Rody being on the run — relies on it to be convincing. At the same time, it’s not that hard to put aside. Even if the reason for Deku and Rody bonding is flimsy, I found that chunk of the movie to be pleasant. I like Rody as a character since he clashes with Deku’s personality and ideals enough to make their relationship interesting without clashing so much that it’s overbearing. His bird, Pino, was an entirely unnecessary annoyance though.

The namesake of the movie — all of the heroes we met so far splitting up to oversee the safety of multiple regions of the world — was extremely underplayed for being the namesake of the movie. As mentioned, this movie is a Midoriya, Bakugo, and Todoroki movie. It’s actually mostly about Midoriya which is fine (this series IS his story after all), but when the other two prominently show up I can’t help but roll my eyes. To be fair, the teams worldwide weren’t up to much anyways so giving them more screentime would’ve worked against the movie. It only existed to present Humarise as a worldwide threat. So ultimately, its execution felt half-baked and unnecessary.

The climax of the movie is thankfully pretty tame this time. There’s no big CG monster or anything. Heck, the fight with the Big Bad is actually pretty interesting with its pacing and theming. But it does suffer from the Musou game problem: the protagonists just mowing down a bunch of mooks without taking damage themselves. This is all while the “camera” swings around so you can’t actually see anything. It also throws Bakugo and Todoroki to the side, which had me wondering why they were even injected there in the first place.

World Heroes’ Mission is a pretty tame, enjoyable movie. Its plot doesn’t reach the heights of intrigue that the anime has and it might not entirely fit together at times, but it doesn’t do anything too stupid or annoying that took me out of it.