My Hero Academia: Vigilantes offers fans more super-powered action

While fans eagerly await the October release of the eighth and final season of My Hero Academia, the 2025 spring anime season has brought a little something to help tide them over: the very first My Hero Academia spinoff anime series. MHA: Vigilantes focuses on new characters, along with new villains, and is set five years before the events of My Hero Academia.

Despite the shift in timelines, MHA fans will recognize a few characters right from the get-go. All-Might appears almost immediately, albeit briefly, and Eraser Head may yet again pick up the mantle of major supporting character. But of course, being legitimate, licensed heroes, they aren’t the stars of this show.

Instead, the main cast consists of three individuals with quirks that are less than useful (and may not even exist at all), who nonetheless make various attempts at using their powers for good.

First up is Koichi Haimawari, whose quirk allows him to glide along surfaces – no, not like Slide N’ Go – Koichi can only go at about the speed of a bike and must have contact with the surface through three points; he typically travels on all fours and is frequently called a cockroach by dejectors. He starts the series with the hero name Nice Guy, but quickly changes to The Crawler once he decides to pivot from doing small good deeds to actually fighting crime.

Pop Step is next, but her leap quirk is mostly used for impromptu musical performances. Still, she supports the vigilantes through social media detective work after being saved from some thugs. It seems she may become the group’s “guy in a chair”, but so far her character is pretty deeply steeped in a “damsel in distress” archetype.

The most enigmatic character by far is the gruff, older man, Knuckleduster. It’s unclear whether this monster of a man actually has a quirk, but he can sure punch things hard! That’s the most important factor when doing vigilante work anyway, right? His punch first, ask questions later approach is a great foil to Koichi’s much calmer demeanor, but mystery surrounds Knuckleduster: who is he, and why is he a vigilante?

The series is off to a great start with its first two episodes introducing an overarching plot of the vigilantes trying to hunt down whoever is distributing the dangerous, quirk-enhancing drug Trigger. This drug was a problem in the main series as well, and while that’s not exactly auspicious, it seems action fans will have plenty to feast on through this series.

There haven’t been any big battles yet, but there have been fights almost constantly throughout the first two episodes. Such is the life of a vigilante. After all, the whole show is about the crime that licensed heroes miss.

That being said, the promotion and introduction to the show may have fans drawing comparisons from other dark spin-offs, such as Cells at Work! Code Black, but it seems that MHA: Vigilantes will be about as tame as the main series. The plus side? There’s no indication that there will be much in the way of high school storylines, as only Pop Step is still in high school, and the first two episodes gave hardly any attention to the characters’ personal lives. MHA fans who are looking for some action-packed justice in Japan should definitely give Vigilantes a watch, especially if they’re starved for anime superheroes.

My Hero Academia: Vigilantes is currently airing on Mondays, with an English dub version released simultaneously on Crunchyroll.