One Punch Man Season 3

Episode 7

After episode seven of season three of One Punch Man, I firmly believe that the team at J.C. Staff on this project was sent out to die. I can't recall the last time I've seen a production team so obviously trying to do their best with what are clearly insufficient resources, and I'm so disappointed to say that this team has come up short. What was supposed to be the beginning of the much-anticipated battle between the Hero Association and Monster Association instead feels like an unsuccessful attempt to artificially inflate the tension in this slog of a season.

To begin, this fight between secondary heroes and jobber monsters already feels deeply unnecessary. This bout wasn't in the original One Punch Man webcomic. It was added to the One Punch Man manga written by One and illustrated by Yūsuke Murata to both expand the world of this story and add some levity in the face of the many upcoming super serious showdowns. These fights work despite adding bloat to the manga because each of the characters is given time to shine as their own specific kind of weirdos. For instance, the hero One-Shotter is a sniper who's usually hyper competent and cool, but is a pants pissing coward the second his gun malfunctions. We get a little bit of this quirky character writing with parody bishi boy Narcisstoic having an incredibly violent fighting style, but there aren't enough of these moments, and this built-up encounter ends up feeling rushed.

The visuals in this episode are also a mixed bag. While the team is clearly trying to make these fights more interesting by doing the best they can with different heroes' special moves, this episode just doesn't look like One Punch Man anymore. Murata's art style makes even background characters look cool, hot, or funny, and the drop in visual quality instead makes these characters look like discount tokusatsu or shonen protagonists. Which, on a meta level, is what these characters are, but that joke only works if the show gives them visuals far above their station. Though I will say that several characters getting their own unique musical cue in this episode suggest that the production team is aware of these animation deficiencies and that they're trying to improve this work through other means.

I cannot stress enough that this encounter is deeply unnecessary if it does not have fun with the characters and interesting fights to show them off. If J.C. Staff was not going to go all out with these fighters and hero moments, they could and should have skipped them! This, to me, implies a failure of leadership to properly plan out and allocate the right kind of talent to this project. I feel so bad for the people who will forever have their names attached to what they know is a lackluster project, while being powerless to meaningfully address the issues at the core of this production.

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When he's not doing 100 push-ups, 100 sit-ups, 100 squats, and a 10k run every day, Lucas DeRuyter is penning some kind of media or social critique. You can get updates on his hero ranking by following his Bluesky account, and keep up with his heroic exploits by checking out his portfolio. When he isn't bargain hunting, you can find him contributing to ANN's This Week in Anime column.

One Punch Man Season 3 is currently streaming on Hulu and Disney+ in the U.S., and Netflix and Crunchyroll in other regions.