My Hero Academia, Season Five, Episode Twenty-One, Revival Party Review: Good for Anime Viewers Disappointing for Manga Readers.

After watching Episode Twenty-One of Season Five for My Hero Academia, “Revival Party,” I saw footage of some storyboard animation done for the episode and contemplated what could have been.
That animation looked great and what we actually got was not up to par.
This is not to say that “Revial Party” is a bad episode, far from it.
In fact, I would say it was a definite step up from the last episode.
However, when compared to the storyboards and the actual My Villain Academia Arc in the manga, this episode just does not live up to that.
For anime only viewers, this is probably not an issue but for manga readers it takes this episode from being good to being disappointing.
It’s not just the animation because the cuts are still really showing here.
Last week they cut out the entire beginning of the arc and also Spinner’s character development.
In “Revial Party” they got rid of a lot of scenes with the Liberation Army, which made Redestro and the rest of them compelling and interesting villains.
In the anime, Redestro feels like a villain of the week, with just basic narration used to give him character, when in the manga he was very well fleshed out and made out to be a big threat.
The same goes for his subordinates so the League fighting them is just not as interesting as it was in the manga, especially when paired with animation that, again, while not bad, just does not live up to what it could have been.
Despite this, I still did enjoy the screentime Toga got, especially with her voice actress Misato Fuken’s work.
Her delivery was great in this episode, especially the “no” line she delivers when one of the Liberation Army leaders Curious asks her for an interview.
What follows is an exploration into Toga’s past, hinting at the mask she put up to hide how she actually was to her peers.
This mask broke when she saw a fellow student (who looks suspiciously like Izuku) get wounded in a fight.
She then attacked this student and drank his blood with a straw in a particularily disturbing image.
Heck, this episode is full of disturbing images of Toga, just look at the one I chose to put up for this review when Toga says she will live a normal life.
This eventually leads to an evolution in Toga’s Quirk, where she gains the ability to use the powers of those whose blood she drinks.
Toga uses this new twist to her Quirk to kill Curious and her followers with Ochako’s Gravity Quirk, sending them high into the sky and then drops them to their deaths.
We also get a look at the beginning of Shigaraki’s Quirk Evolution, as he decays a wave of people without even touching them.
I hope at least when we get to his backstory episode it is done justice.
That is one episode Studio Bones cannot screw up.
As for the other League members, it is mostly build up for the next episode.
We see Dabi’s beginning fight with Geten, which could give us the oppurtunity for some fluid animation later.
Another oppurtunity for this is Twice’s story, where another Liberation army leader, named Skeptic, sends his drones after him and Toga, which is the end of the episode.
I have not seen the next episode yet, so I do not know if these opprtunities for great animation have been taken but, given how the past few episodes has been, I doubt they have.
It would be a pleasant surprise to watch that episode and see the scenes have been done justice.
Overall, “Revial Party” is a pretty good episode of My Hero Academia regardless of its shortcomings.
If you’re an anime only, you probably will not have an issue with it.
If you’re a manga reader, though, that’s another story entirely.