Jul 20, 2018
Vigilante: Boku no Hero Academia Illegals is at 33 chapters at the time of writing and is exactly what it sells itself as. The world of Boku no Hero, except instead of through the rose-tinted glasses of the societal elites who followed their dreams of becoming heroes because of their exceptional talent and outstanding quirks, through the eyes of a less fortunate protagonist and his ragtag group of misfits who are trying to undermine the law that has neglected them so.
Despite what the genres say on the MAL page I consider Vigilante to be a seinen, mostly on the tighter focused cast and plot being
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much more set in relative "reality" than shounens typically are. The main character gets his ass kicked often, the plot is about darker themes than one would expect from shounen, and the focus is much less on flashy quirks more on just the characters we follow. Which to a shounen demographic I would see getting bored really quickly of something like this. Now that's not to say there aren't flashy action scenes with fists flying, as everything in this manga while not by the original author of BNHA is drawn VERY well, I myself have fancied it better than BNHA's art at times. The action scenes are usually very detailed with a very clear sense of impact with everything that goes down, and in terms of being hype as FUCK, yeah, it does a pretty good job.
Koichi, Kazuho, Knuckleduster and Makoto are a great cast of **4** all with their own unique dynamic they add to the group of vigilantes. Which is easy to remember and a hell of a lot better than BNHA's cast of 25+, which I'm not sure where the anime is at the time of writing this but the manga only gets worse in terms of remembering characters. every arc in BNHA really feels like you have to just pretend you're reading another series just so you can re-jot down the character's names, as you know there's gonna be another 10 that are going to be introduced, and if you don't remember them then man are you gonna be confused when the new character "feather man" reveals himself to be all might's dad the whole time and gets added to the permanent cast! Whatever, this isn't a BNHA rant this is a Vigilante review. While it does include some of the pro heroes from BNHA it's mostly just them in their everyday lives, and you don't need to know them previously to get a grasp on what their deal is in this series as it pretty much re-establishes them. In fact, for some characters like Ingenium, it helps their character a lot more than BNHA thanks to BNHA giving them no screentime over whatever 2 characters they want to develop alongside deku this arc. Unlike BNHA, you can go *their* entire time not knowing any of the pro heroes' names and it won't really harm your experience of the story at all, as instead of developing their characters their role in the story is to develop our main characters more, which writing-wise is a lot more neat and focused. I know I've said focused like 3 times, but in comparison to BNHA that's really the only word I can use.
The only reason you shouldn't pick this up if you already tried BNHA is if you're a part of the subsection of BNHA that likes to ship people, as the small cast will definitely leave you wanting. Yet, at the same time, I won't miss you, whoever you are.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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