This is a widely popular anime, and despite it's issues I can see why so many like it. The protagonist and the concept of his powers are interesting, and that is the main draw. The voice work is also decent, the animation is high quality, and the overarching story isn't bad. Plus, the music is pretty damn good. For glowing reviews of its better qualities, however, see the 10 star reviews. If you're reading this, then chances are you want to know where it falls down.

1. It's superheroes. It's a bit of a played out trope and unlike series like Invincible or The Boys, Hy Hero Academia doesn't do anything to break the mold.

2. The powers. People start developing super powers in this world a la X-men and mutants but with much less impressive powers on display. All of the main tropes are covered from shape shifting and super strength to flight and shooting fire or ice. But they show now restraint or thought, really, in coming up with these powers. If you can think of it, no matter how dumb, someone in this show has it as a power (called quirks in this setting). Watching this series give one the impression that the studio locked a bunch of starving writers in a dark room and told them if they wanted dinner then they each had to come up with one hundred different super powers by 5:00. Bathroom breaks required at least twenty. Most of the main cast's powers are interesting enough, but the side characters suffer. One guy shoots tape from his elbows while another girl has aux cables for earlobes. Too bad about apple phasing those port out, huh?

3. The characters. In the first season or two the characters are all painfully two dimensional. This is the angry yelling kid. This is the goody-two-shoes. This is the saccharine love interest. And here he was the uptight, straight laced one. Oh, and let's not forget the perv, the village idiot, and the broody kid with the tragic past. Hell, one of the characters is basically just modernized Zuko from AtLA. As the story progresses, the writers seem to put more and more effort into fleshing these characters out, and they make strides toward this, but as a result of this being necessary a lot of screen time is devoted to flashbacks in order to retcon a personality into each character. Even with the most recent season, many of them struggle to break out of the two dimensional mold in which they were first cast.

4. There's a lot of filler in this series. If you cut out all the episodes that contribute nothing and don't really advance the plot, the series would be half it's current size. This often makes the show's pacing feel ponderous. At times if feels like the writers couldn't decide if they wanted to make a show about superheroes or yet another anime focusing on the idealized slice of life of Japanese high school, and rather than weave these elements together skillfully, the show waffles back and forth between these two elements, with the latter often feeling like empty fluff.

Over all it's another "What if high school, but with (insert gimmick)" in this case super powers, because Marvel is popular and anime has always suffered from a sort of copycat syndrome. It isn't all that poorly executed, and aside from all the filler, the episodes that actually move the plot along are enjoyable enough.

Watch it if there's nothing better on.