English Dub Review: Cautious Hero: The Hero is Overpowered but Overly Cautious “Too Much For a Novice Goddess to Bear”

Overview

After escaping Chaos Machina, Ristarte and Seiya wind up back in the Divine Realm, where Seiya insists on training more before going back to face Chaos Machina in Gaeabrande. He trains for two days, but when Ristarte uses her crystal ball to spy on Chaos Machina’s whereabouts, she’s greeted with a message from the demon herself: for every ten minutes they hide from her, she kills a towns-person.

Ristarte rushes to Seiya with the news, but he seems insistent on training. Ristarte seems to give up on Seiya, seeing his heartlessness. However, he gets up, and tells her he is now (somehow) “more than ready.”

They rush to Gaeabrande and Seiya stops Nina — a little girl who gave him a flower charm — and her father from being decapitated. Chaos Machina then turns into a gigantic demon (her true form) and the odds of winning look very slim for Seiya. Somehow, he continues to dodge and battle with her, though. Ristarte is suspicious of Seiya’s power and realizes he’d been using his Fake Out skill to seem less powerful than he truly was the whole time. At his level, he is able to defeat Chaos Machina. The town is saved, but Seiya sets it on fire while bombing Chaos Machina’s remains.

Despite destroying the town and possibly killing some innocents, Nina’s father thanks him with money. Seiya bullies him into handing over all his money, and he goes back to the Divine Realm with Ristarte.

Our Take

Yeah, it’s really not looking good for Seiya as a character. For one thing, it’s fine to have a character be a symbol for overpowered anime/video game archetypes, but the character still has to be likable. It’s fun that Seiya is a parody of these things, but his (initially relatable) rational sense of thinking that the audience saw in the first episode seemed to be overpowered by the insanely rash decisions he made in this episode. It would have been very easy for him to pick up Chaos Machina’s remains and blow them up in a secluded location — or even have Ristarte transport them to someplace else. Instead, it’s almost like the writers dumped out all of Ristarte’s passion for saving innocent lives in favor of a funny bit.

Truly, if Ristarte was genuinely concerned with the safety of mankind, how on earth did Seiya’s destruction of the town barely phase her? She gave him a light scolding, went, “haha, people died, you baka!” and then they went about their merry way.

Seiya’s intentions and character motivations seem so unclear, and very lost. Plus, his methods of leveling up have not yet been explained. He doesn’t seem like a “cautious” hero — he seems like he’s more selfishly aligned than anything. He’s not concerned with the well-being of others, and only seems to be concerned with powering through Gaeabrande and going home — which would be fine if he wasn’t such an insufferable a**hole to everyone who interacts with him. He comes off as sociopathic.

The animation and character expressions on this show are so nice — plus, Ristarte’s voice actress did an exceptionally great job on this episode. However, the show seems to have a rising conflict where it can’t decide when it’s serious and when it’s a comedy/parody.