Vigilante: Boku no Hero Academia Illegals 2nd Season - 01

OP: “CATCH!!!” by Threee (すりぃ)

I’ve pretty much given up fighting it at this point. Murphy has it in for me where scheduling is concerned. If I’m traveling, it’s going to be insane for anime – it’s just a given. I’m enjoying my first trip to Okinawa at the moment, right at the time my three top picks of the season premiere. I hate short-changing first impressions posts but my reserves of time and energy make it unavailable (and I’m having to delay Golden Kamuy half a day to boot). At least with GK and Vigilantes they’re sequels, so the amount of setup I have to do is reduced.

Illegals doesn’t count as a split cour, having had six months off between seasons. But that’s effectively what it was, as there’s no doubt at least two seasons were greenlit in advance. I say “at least” because the hope is that all four cours that would be needed to properly adapt the manga are a go. It has the Boku no Hero Academia mantle on its shoulders now, but both Vigilante and the parent series are finished so I don’t think we can take anything for granted.

This show just missed the 2025 top ten as you know, but there are definitely years it would have made it. It fulfils the spinoff role about as well as any series could, and Bones is pretty much a lock to be nails as far as the adaptation is concerned. We pick up pretty much where we left off, tonally at least. Clearly some time has passed but probably not all that much. And notably, of Knuckleduster there’s no mention. The kids obviously haven’t forgotten about Oguro-san – he became a vital figure in their lives (especially Kouichi’s). But they seemed to have moved on, at least superficially.

Kouichi and Pop are off on a field trip – to Osaka, for a showcase of mascot idols. Kouichi is acting in manager capacity but missed the train buying an ekiben. Now, I don’t want to be that guy but I can’t resist pointing out that there are literally Nozomi (the fast one) Shinkansens between Tokyo and Osaka every 5 or 6 minutes – Kouichi missing that train was seriously no biggie. But it does give him the impetus to discover and new element in his quirk – he can stick to things (like Shinkansen) rather than using his quirk to repel them.

Osaka is where much of the action is here, though Kazuho and Kouichi aren’t at the hart of it. Tsukaichi is in town to help bust up a drug ring that uses these idol shows as a front, and he’s working with Osaka hero Fatgum. He’s also working with a mascot idoal called Kaniyashiki Monica (Kana Ueda), which is not as weird as it sounds because she’s also an undercover cop. The ironic part is that she has a mobile suit and she uses it for the idol persona, not for battling crime.

Lastly, there is stuff happening back in Naruhata. Eraser Head has been sent in to scout for info on Trigger, which he does basically by taking down a couple of small-time thugs and coercing them to spill what they know. Which, most crucially, is a “nastier mix” of Trigger which is going around. Vigilante may be smaller in scope than HeroAca, but that’s a strength rather than a weakness. It’s a much more compact and more personal story, and knows exactly what its formula for success is.