My Hero Academia Vigilantes is a side series, and it’s just wrapped up. The main series is apparently in the process of winding up its final story but who knows how long that takes. The final two volumes of vigilantes show the conclusion of the final epic battle and hints at the not too distant futures for those who survive (mostly). Koichi aka Crawler, the seemingly lucky idiot who wants to be a hero but not an official one, has been facing off against the main antagonist (kinda, that’s a story that provides one of the main links to the main series as it involves a cameo for a character very much a part of that final sequence too) Number 6. As 6 and Koichi fight they both do two things very common in fighting manga adventure story boss-level fights: they start internally monologuing backstory/self-realizations, and they both end up levelling up repeatedly to new abilities or levels of current abilities. This means that about half this final bit of story is these two thinking and reliving and working out their personal innermost stuff which takes the form of other characters sort of walking into the scene, but they aren’t really there, they’re representative figments of imagination, or something like that. There’s enough of it concentrated here repeatedly that it gets a little old and feels like filler for some pages.
The ending though, I mostly liked. It wasn’t quite the cliché everyone on team good survives and ends up with their person and the life they always wanted and happily ever after; don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of that, but it’s a little more complex too. Turns out, happily ever after isn’t easy, it takes work, and may not necessarily be easily achieved, even after you’re finally on the path you may have been yelling about wanting the entire 15 volumes. Ok, to be fair, actually no one quite does that in this series, much to my relief, but most manga/anime people who would be interested in this series probably know what I mean. Destinies aren’t quite what everyone may have had in mind basically, and even though the endings are mostly what you’d expect, it’s just tweaked enough to make it a pretty solid conclusion to a story that is sort of a prequel to the main series. Given what happens in the main series and the links to it, I’d kind of like to see Koichi or Knuckleduster make a cameo in the main series. Kind of unlikely, but it would be fun.