English Dub Review: Cautious Hero: The Hero is Overpowered but Overly Cautious “The Hero is Too Cautious”

Overview

In the Unified Divine Realm (a place where gods and goddesses dwell to create worlds) the Goddess Ristarte is chosen to bring salvation to an “S-Class” world — which is considered to be one of the most challenging and dangerous worlds to save. Considering that Ristarte has only saved five worlds — in comparison to experienced gods and goddesses who have saved hundreds — the challenge is extremely daunting to her. Goddesses and gods also cannot directly intervene in saving the worlds themselves either, which is why the real task is selecting a mortal who they can train to become a hero. While looking through some mortals’ files from Earth’s Japan, she finds Seiya Ryuuguuin: a human whose “stats” are inexplicably healthy, strong, and formidable.

She summons him to the realm and tells him of his destiny to save Gaeabrande from a demon lord, but his overly-analytical and aloof nature, lack of excitement, and questioning cause her frustration. He refuses to go to Gaeabrande until he’s properly trained, so he locks himself in her house for a week until he’s even more shredded than before. Ristarte’s goddess friend Aria advises her to be a patient friend to him, and the pair goes to Gaeabrande.

After Seiya hilariously over-kills a level one monster, they’re ambushed by Machina, one of the demon lord’s powerful kings. Rationally understanding that this demon is far stronger than he is, Seiya does the logical thing: he runs away.

Our Take

Despite the extremely wacky title, the world of story and animation introduced is enticingly colorful and inviting. The Unified Divine Realm’s salvation challenges seem somewhat reminiscent of the hero challenges in My Hero Academia — complete with all kinds of gods and goddesses who have different strengths, weaknesses, and personalities. Sadly, we didn’t get to see much of it, but hopefully, they won’t leave it in the dust.

Ristarte is a character who gives off some serious Usagi Tsukino vibes. She’s hopeful and confident, yet boy crazy and impatient. Seiya, on the other hand, seems to be a big middle finger to most shonen protagonist archetypes. He isn’t air-headed and inexperienced — he’s realistically skeptical and sensible about all of this crazy isekai sh*t. He’s an a-typically realistic and logical character plopped into a world with fantastically trope-ish characters. It’s a pretty clever pairing considering what they’re going for — and based on the first impression, what they’re going for is a meta show.

Everything from watching Ristarte ponder why so many humans from Japan tend to be the “chosen ones” to seeing Machina detail how “predictable” it would be for Seiya and Ristarte to be located in the area where all the weakest monsters were (AKA grinding for XP), it all adds up to Cautious Hero being a Meta Comedy about the fantasy hero/RPG tropes in anime.

The show is still new, so it could fall into some bad tropes (the female character designs are basically just Titty City) but if it sticks to parodying them (such as when Seiya comments on how illogical Ristarte’s clothes are) it shouldn’t be too bad.