Sunday 30 November 2014

Boku no Hero Academia 15 Review: Action

Boku no Hero Academia Chapter 15: VERSUS

Oh, why the heck not, I'll review this chapter too.

First, can I call into attention the little cover page that brings to mind actual old Western superhero comics, what with the fake comic bar thing on the upper left with 'Jump Comics' and all the random proclamations on the cover? I do like it a lot.

Anyway, All Might has apparently noticed that neither Aizawa or 13 had picked up their phones or whatever, and is about to head off to investigate before he's stopped by the Principal with the justification that if he was so worried he can't maintain his All Might-ness for more than ten minutes or so anyway. The Principal is an anthropomorphic animal instead of a human -- he outright states that 'humans can't achieve this kind of luster' and 'you can't make out if he's a mouse, a dog or a bear'. He also tends to ramble on and on about stuff, and ends up having tea with All Might after giving him a bit of a lecture about how there are other heroes around and how he shouldn't overexert himself. So no one is even aware of what's going on in USJ or even sent help yet. So I guess they're all on their own.

After that scene, we cut away to Ida, No. 13 (who I misidentified as Mr. 13 when reviewing the last chapter), Uraraka, the dude with creepy butterfly tentacle things that can transform into other organs, dark-skinned girl with buggy eyes, and quite a few others, are facing off against shadow-portal dude. Ida gets sent off to warn the school because he's the fastest, and while he protests initially, he does it anyway. Shadow Portal guy moves in to attack going all "you're idiots for spouting off your plan where everyone can hear you." which is one of the biggest complaints I have about manga in general, how characters like to just plan in front of their enemies. No. 13 retorts with an awesome claim of his own, going about how they let him hear because it's no problem if he knows, and apparently removes the tips of one of his gloves' fingers and activates his black hole abilities or something? We don't get to see too much of this fight, though, since we cut away to Team Midoriya.

Team Midoriya is facing off against the group of water-based villains, and they take the lull in the villains' caution to discuss about more stuff. We get an explanation of Tsuyu's abilities -- in addition to her frog jumping and tongue abilities, she can also inflate her stomach and secrete a mucus from there (something which Mineta completely gets perverted thoughts about). Mineta, meanwhile, can pull off those weird ball-looking things from his head and throw it at people, and those are absolutely sticky things to everyone except himself... but if he does it too much, it'll make him bleed. We also get to see more of their characterizations. Tsuyu is mostly deadpan, whereas Mineta is panicky and perverted and goes all UWAAAAAA at the slightest things and lampshades how his powers are useless.

What follows is a nice little teamwork by Midoriya, making use about how cautious and unsure the villains are, by flicking the water really hard, and as the water comes back together, Mineta throws a shit-ton of his sticky hairballs to clump all the baddies together while Tsuyu gets them both to safety. Overall a pretty nice little team up and a nice little usage of all these strange powers. There's also some intrigue about just how weak these villain grunts are... though they are fairly well organized, talking about their orders and advices from the higher-ups. In particular, the name Shigaraki was brought up.

Overall still following this series. Interested to see the full scale of the villain organization... or if this little group isn't even technically a threat or something like that. Will we see No. 13's powers? Will we see more of the other students like Bakugou, Uraraka, Momo, Fire-and-Ice-guy and the rest fight? Definitely interested in this.

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