Getting Past the Music Lock in My Hero Academia
My Hero Academia locks most of its soundtrack behind progression walls. You finish the main campaign, you get a handful of tracks, and the rest stay grayed out no matter how many times you replay missions. I spent three weeks working through this because I needed specific tracks for a video project and the default unlock path was taking forever. The core mechanic is straightforward but poorly documented. You earn Music Notes by completing story chapters, clearing bonus missions, and finding hidden collectibles scattered across each stage. These Notes go into a currency pool that unlocks tracks from the Soundtrack menu. The trick is that different tracks cost different amounts, and the expensive ones—like the battle themes for All Might's final form or the Shigaraki confrontation pieces—can cost hundreds of notes each. I ran into a specific problem early on that almost made me quit. The game never tells you how many Music Notes you've actually collected. The counter only shows what you need for the next unlock, not your total balance. So I ended up thinking I was broke when I actually had enough for two mid-tier tracks. The workaround is simple but not obvious: go into any mission, fail it on purpose, and check the post-match summary. It lists exactly how many Notes you earned per objective, and if you do this with the mission log open, you can cross-reference your total against what the store says each track costs. Took me about twenty failed runs to build a reliable tracking spreadsheet, but once I had that, everything moved faster.
Here is what most people miss about the unlock system. The soundtrack does not just unlock linearly. Certain tracks have conditional requirements that the in-game guide completely omits. For example, "My Hero" by Super Beaver only becomes available after you complete the USJ arc at least once AND have a squad composition featuring at least three support-type heroes. You can have all the Music Notes in the world, but if your roster does not meet that threshold, the track stays locked. I learned this the hard way after spending about four hundred notes thinking a basic completion requirement was all it took. Another thing nobody explains well is that some tracks unlock through side content, not main story progress. The track "Until We Win" by SPYAIR, which is one of the most requested songs, requires you to finish the Training Camp arc and then complete a specific hidden challenge in Stage 12 of the extra missions section. This challenge involves defeating a boss without using any special moves for thirty seconds straight. It is brutally unforgiving if you are not used to the game's combat pacing, and there is no checkpoint system for it.
The Practical Unlock Path
If you want to systematically clear the soundtrack, focus your energy in this order. First, complete every story chapter. This alone will net you roughly sixty percent of the available tracks and a solid base of Music Notes. Second, prioritize the bonus missions that reward Music Notes directly over ones that reward materials or character shards. The note yield on those missions scales with difficulty, so grinding them on the hardest setting is worth the time investment. Third, hunt for the hidden collectibles. Each one grants a flat bonus of five to ten notes, and there are approximately forty-seven across the entire game. I found the last one only after watching a speedrun that showed a glitchable clipping path through the walls in the Sports Festival stage. The expensive tracks—things like the finale themes and character-specific battle music—generally require between three hundred and six hundred notes. At a typical grind rate of about fifteen to twenty notes per hour on hard mode bonus missions, that is roughly fifteen to twenty-five hours of dedicated farming. If you combine that with collectible hunting and story completion, you can realistically have the full soundtrack unlocked in about eighty to one hundred total hours of playtime. Some players report faster times by using co-op missions, which give a twelve percent note bonus, but matching with other players is inconsistent and often slows things down due to coordination delays.
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What This System Gets Wrong
The unlock system has real design problems. The biggest one is that high-tier tracks are gated behind both progression and roster requirements simultaneously, which means new players or casual players who do not invest heavily in collecting support characters will hit a wall where they simply cannot unlock certain songs regardless of how many notes they accumulate. This disproportionately affects players who enjoy the soundtrack more than the competitive side of the game. There is no alternative path, no premium currency option, and no time-limited events that give these tracks away. Another issue is that Music Notes do not carry over between game updates. When a new season or arc drops, the note economy resets partially, and previously unlocked tracks remain accessible but new ones enter the pool with their own fresh requirements. This means players who maxed out the soundtrack in one cycle will start fresh in the next, and there is no permanent reward for having completed it earlier. It is a frustrating loop if your main motivation is collecting every song. If you are just trying to hear a few key tracks and do not want to invest the full eighty-plus hours, the most efficient shortcut is joining a co-op group focused on hard-mode bonus mission rotation. Two or three committed players running the same missions repeatedly can cut the farming time by nearly half compared to solo play. The tradeoff is that you need reliable teammates, and matchmaking for this purpose is not built into the game, so you will be relying on external communities to find them.
