Joseph Luster
February 19, 2020 
Disclosure: A sample Banpresto Box was temporarily provided for review purposes.
Many of the box services you can sign up for online are kind of a gamble. You don’t always know what you’re going to get, especially when they’re based on a subscription service of some kind. That’s not the case with the Banpresto Box, which recently kicked off orders for a compact but loaded box of My Hero Academia themed items. It’s not a subscription, and what you see is what you get. All in all it’s a pretty high quality and affordable option for big-time fans of Kohei Horikoshi‘s series.
Which, at this point, is pretty much everyone, right? That’s definitely how it seems when it comes to My Hero Academia‘s ever-increasing popularity. It’s become one of the most well-known shonen staples in recent years, which makes the Banpresto Box a nicely timed piece of merchandise. When I got mine in the mail, I was surprised at the reasonable size of the box itself, and was excited to dig into the randomly-selected items inside.
For review purposes, I checked out a bunch of the different possible versions of items that come in the My Hero Academia box. The smaller pieces include key chains, pins, art boards, and “Memories File” photographs, which are basically little sets of animation cel style images that can be placed inside a frame themed after Deku’s own superhero notebook.
What you end up with is chosen at random, but most of the bases seem to be covered as far as lead characters are concerned. No matter how the dice rolls, you’ll likely end up with Deku, Bakugo, Todoroki, All Might, or some combination of the key heroes. All that’s missing from the available options is some type of representation for the ladies of My Hero Academia—like Ochaco Uraraka, or perhaps the ever-lovable Tsuyu “Froppy” Asui—but there’s certainly room for these and other additions in the future.
Everything included is of pretty high quality, from the sturdy art boards to the colorful rubber keychains. The true centerpiece, however, is the Izuku Midoriya figure, which stands at nearly 10 inches in height. There’s a chance you could end up with a special color version at random, but either way it’s a really nice figure that will look great on any MHA fan’s shelf or desktop. As long as you’re cool with the fact that it isn’t posable at all, you’re unlikely to be disappointed once you pull Deku out of the box.
The important thing to remember here is that Banpresto Box isn’t a subscription service. These are one-off boxes you can pre-order now and, according to the Premium Bandai site, there are limited quantities available for this first entry. If the five items within sound like they’re too good to pass up, you’ll find the final products are worth the price of admission.
