Eight seasons. 170 episodes. Ten years of Izuku Midoriya reaching for something he was told he could never hold. My Hero Academia closed its run on December 13, 2025, and the numbers behind it are as unusual as its premise.
Trailer, via animelab.
A Quirkless Boy at U.A. High School
The setup is the whole show in miniature. Izuku is born without a Quirk — a superpower — in a world where eighty percent of the population has one. He enrolls anyway at U.A. High School, one of the most prestigious hero academies there is.
That is a clean, almost cruel hook, and it holds because the series never lets Izuku forget what he lacks. Bones, the studio behind the adaptation of Kōhei Horikoshi’s manga, built the whole thing on that gap.
All Might and the Gift That Changes Everything
The turn comes early. All Might, the world’s greatest hero, scouts Izuku and passes his own Quirk to the boy after seeing his potential. It is a handoff that gives the story its engine and its central debt: Izuku is not self-made. He is chosen.
That choice matters. My Hero Academia is less a story about a boy earning power than about a boy learning what to do with power someone else handed him.
Daiki Yamashita and the Voice of Izuku
Daiki Yamashita voices Izuku Midoriya in the Japanese version, and the performance carries the character’s particular mix of nerves and resolve. The English dub, which aired on Adult Swim’s Toonami block through the sixth season, drew its own praise.
The series earned recognition for its animation, music, pacing, action sequences, and voice acting in both languages. Those aren’t small categories, and the show was competitive in all of them.
Four Films, Ten OVAs, and a Final Volume Special
The franchise outgrew television. Four animated films followed — Two Heroes, Heroes Rising, World Heroes’ Mission, and You’re Next — along with ten original video animations.
A television special adapting a bonus chapter from the manga’s final volume premiered May 2, 2026, after the series itself had ended. Crunchyroll holds the North American license.
The Broadcast Run That Outlasted Its Era
The first season premiered April 3, 2016, on Mainichi Broadcasting System, TBS Television and their Japan News Network affiliates. From season two onward, the show moved to Yomiuri TV, Nippon TV and their Nippon Television Network System affiliates, where it stayed through the eighth and final season.
That is a long, stable run for any anime.
What Twenty Twenty-Five Closed
Eight seasons is enough rope to hang most series. My Hero Academia avoided that by keeping its question fixed: what does a powerless kid owe the world once someone decides he isn’t powerless?
The show grew in scope as it went, and the finale closed the story the manga set out to tell.
By the Numbers
- Score: 8.6/10
- Seasons: 8
- Episodes: 170
- First aired: April 3, 2016
- Final episode: December 13, 2025
- Studio: Bones
- Source: Kōhei Horikoshi’s manga
- Films: 4. OVAs: 10
- TMDB audience score: 8.6/10 from 5,377 votes
Why It Lands at 8.6
8.6 out of 10. My Hero Academia is one of the most notable anime titles of the 2010s, and it earned the label across a decade of steady broadcast rather than a single breakout moment. The premise is simple and the execution rarely is.
What keeps it at 8.6 rather than higher is the drift toward scale in the later seasons. The series received praise for its animation, music, pacing, action sequences, and voice acting, and it remains one of the defining anime of its decade.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.