English Dub Season Review: Cautious Hero: The Hero Is Overpowered But Overly Cautious Season One

The hype for this show was outrageous — everything from colorful previews to over-blown posters at New York Comic Con made it seem as though (even with such a stupid title) this show might actually be good. Luckily, we can continue judging books by their titles, because Cautious Hero: The Hero Is Overpowered But Overly Cautious was really not worth the watch.

The show is about a goddess named Ristarte, who lives in the Divine Realm, where other gods/goddesses dwell. Their purpose is to save worlds from destruction, but since it is against divine law for goddesses/gods to intervene themselves, they must summon a human hero to do it instead. Ristarte (AKA “Rista”) gets assigned an “S-Class” world, which happens to be one of the toughest ones to save. However, she manages to locate a human hero who, inexplicably, has overpowered stats. She summons him, only to find out that he’s a gigantic, self-preserving asshole. His name is Seiya, and with Rista’s help, he must reluctantly save the world of Gaebrande from the evil Demon Lord.

Basically, the viewer spends about ten straight episodes watching Rista and Seiya fight over how to save the world, and despite his insufferable/stoic character, the viewer is somehow supposed to keep watching. Seiya is an a-typical hero — he’s definitely more neutral aligned than anything, but it’s hard to believe in his heroism when he’s burning down towns and practically mugging people “just to be safe.”  Cautious Hero: The Hero Is Overpowered But Overly Cautious is definitely meant to be a comedy, but this joke wears off pretty quickly — because it’s the same joke over and over again. “Seiya, do ____!” “No.” “Oh you!” In addition to not being a very good comedy, it also randomly decides to be serious, as if it can successfully juggle both (spoilers: it really can’t.) Bloody, dark scenes will sometimes randomly appear, but it mostly comes off as tonally inconsistent.

Then we have the ending, which is supposed to make everything all better and excuse the fact that 4/5ths of the show is repetitive and not as good. Seiya only becomes a three-dimensional character in the end, because the viewer finds out that he was a summoned hero in his last life, and due to his stereotypically optimistic/bold shonen nature, his lack of cautiousness got his entire team killed — including Rista, who used to be human (and his lover.) His guilt (and stats) carried over into his next life, where he vowed to save everyone when he was summoned again. This was a great reveal, but…it unfortunately wasn’t worth the ten episode wait. There was no build-up or foreshadowing — all we got was a big exposition dump on why we actually shouldn’t hate Seiya.

Also, the portrayal of most of the women in this show was…bad. So many of them were inexplicably in love with Seiya, despite the fact that he has the personality of a doorknob. At the very least, a shining light came in the form of Rista’s English VA, who absolutely killed it in her performance. While all the other voices were kinda bland, she definitely shone through as everything a voice should be: engaging and entertaining.

All in all, it’s not the worst show out there, but it doesn’t know what it wants to be — or does, but isn’t very good at it. It’s not really worth the time, unless they really kick up the foreshadowing/character development next season. If so, it might wind up being worth it after all — but if you intend to watch, at least be cautious about it.