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My Hero Academia‘s final season is slated to hit the anime airwaves sometime later this year. While fans prepare to say goodbye to its ensemble of heroes, Studio Bones is opening another on its spin-off series, My Hero Academia: Vigilantes, due out this April.
Earlier today, Bones released a new trailer for the spin-off prequel series of creator Kohei Horikoshi’s shonen epic. Initially created in 2017 by Hideyuki Furuhashi and Betten Court, Vigilantes (also known by the name Illegals) takes place five years before Izuku Midoriya’s heroic tale. Instead, the series follows Koichi Haimawari, a college student with a straightforward ability to travel on flat surfaces. As the title suggests, Koichi doesn’t have a hero license but still goes out of his way to save people–think Marvel heroes operating outside of the Sokovia Accords in the MCU. His life is forever changed when he and a high schooler named Kazuho Haneyema are saved by a vigilante named Knuckleduster, who takes them on as his sidekicks. The one-minute-thirty-second trailer is packed with action and heart that fans have come to love about the original series.
Coupled with its new trailer, Bones revealed the voice actors behind its new hero team. Key among them is Shuichiro Umeda (Akira Tendo in Zom 100: Bucketlist of the Dead) as Koichi, Ikumi Hasegawa (Ubel in Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End) as Kazuho, and Yasuhiro Mamiya (Hwang Dong-Suk in Solo Leveling) as Knuckleduster. Seeing how Vigilantes takes place in the MHA universe, the series will also see cameos from fan-favorite heroes like Shoto Aizawa.
While My Hero Academia has the daunting shonen reputation for being a long watch as it draws closer to its seventh season, folks looking to dip their toe into Vigilantes can breathe a sigh of relief knowing that its anime won’t be a daunting endeavor to watch. Compared to the original manga’s 430 chapters, which was serialized in 2014, Vigilantes‘ manga concluded in 2022 with only 127 chapters. Despite its diminutive chapter count, Vigilantes garnered a strong fan base from the crop of My Hero Academia manga spin-offs (of which there are five), making its anime a hyped series anime fans highly anticipate seeing in motion once it debuts on April 7. Here’s hoping the series finds the same success as its progenitor.
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