English Dub Review: Cautious Hero: The Hero is Overpowered but Overly Cautious “The Truth Is Too Much to Bear”

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Rista, Elulu, and Mash have a cute, filler-episode-esque day in the city, but when they return to the castle, Seiya isn’t there. They search for him but realize he must have gone back to the Divine Realm to train. However, when they get there, Aria is crying, and she takes them to Ishtar — who then takes them to the “place where time stands still.” It’s a special room where all the souls of the gods and goddesses are kept.

Ishtar reveals that Seiya had left without them to go face the Demon Lord on his own to keep the others safe and that his level had secretly been maxed out for quite some time. The group is shocked and in disbelief. Rista questions why he would do something so uncharacteristic, and how he was able to come off as so powerful. Ishtar replies that it was because he’d made up for his maxed levels by learning new feats and abilities.

The truth is revealed to Rista: in a past life, she was the mortal princess of a B-Class world in which Seiya had been summoned to save. Aria was his accompanying goddess. Seiya in his past life was much like Rosalie — headstrong, reckless, but full of heart. Due to this, though, his team was slaughtered. Rista watches the magical flashback as her past self is devoured by a Demon Lord, while Seiya’s past self watches. It is also revealed that they were lovers and that she was pregnant.

Seiya’s despair and regret manifested into his next life, where he became who he is today: cold, cautious, but feeling the need to redeem his actions. Rista sobs with Aria, but vows to go back to Gaeabrande and help Seiya — even if it costs her soul.

Our Take

Just when it can’t get any stupider, it gets brilliant. This was the missing “WOW” factor that the show needed — or rather, the one it was hiding all along. This episode leaves a mix of joy and frustration: why wasn’t this the kind of quality this show had from the start? Why did it take so long to get here?

The outstanding fault of this episode was that it was…pretty much all exposition. It’s a lot of sitting down and listening to Ishtar explain 1) Why Seiya is the way he is 2) What Seiya’s been doing this whole time 3) That Rista and Seiya were lovers/adventurers in a past life and don’t remember. The magical flashback made things more immersive, though, as things were better seen than heard.

Seiya’s hidden heart brings up a lot of questions, though. If he truly cared that much for people this entire time, then how come he practically burned down an entire village in the first two episodes? Maybe it’s not that he’s a good-aligned character, but that he’s neutral — only feels the need to aggressively protect the people close to him, and no one else. He’s obviously much different than how he was in his past life, but the behavior probably has to do with his residual feelings of aggressive protectiveness and a need to make up for what happened (even though he doesn’t remember.) Bonus thought: the fact that Rista’s past self was pregnant added an extra layer of darkness to the whole thing — a real punch to the heart.

The real question, though, is this: if a regular viewer went onto Funimation right now and decided to watch this, would it be obvious that this kind of quality would be present later on in the show? The bad thing about this episode is that…it’s not very likely that serious anime fans would forgive all of the dumb episodes that came before it. Would people watch long enough to get here, or would they have bailed by episode five?

It just goes to show: don’t hold off on quality. It’s like a burrito: if it’s made vertically, the meat of the show is going to sit at the bottom, while the eater is going to be too disgusted with a mouth full of plain sour cream to see it to the end.