This past season, Funimation licensed and put out for streaming a two-episode My Hero Academia OVA, set during Season 4. I’ve recently given that a watch and would like to give a few thoughts on the show.
The Survival Training OVA is prior to the provisional license exams, with Eraserhead sending Class 1A through a training exercise to prepare them for the exams. The scenario puts the class into a mockup ruined underground mall in one of the campus’s training exercise areas. The objective – find and locate a dummy representing an injured civilian in one of the underground areas and safely bring them to the surface. However, after damage to the building splits up the group and lightly injures Iida, the team now has to rescue themselves.
The plot of the OVA is pretty light. It’s basically meant to provide a variety of circumstances for various team members to bounce off of each other, except the interactions are ones we’re generally familiar with – Bakugo is with Denki and Eijiro, Deku with Tsu and Uraraka. Probably the one interaction we haven’t seen particularly heavily is Todoroki and Tokoyami. Those two we haven’t seen bounce off of each other that much.
I would have liked to have seen the writers shake things up a little bit – something like Bakugo having to work with Aoyama or Sato, if only to put him in a situation where his success is dependent on showing he can work with people he hasn’t previously established a rapport with (something that that Deku has demonstrated he’s incredibly good at).
Otherwise, the story is fine – it’s definitely a stand-alone story that provides some neat character beats and mild action sequences. It’s completely skippable in the grander scale of things, but if you’re looking for some more Hero-Aca while you’re waiting for next season, this is worth your time.
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