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

Overview

Rista, Elulu, and Mash warp to the Demon Lord’s lair — breaking a divine rule in order to help Seiya. There, they see Seiya battling the Demon Lord. As he is about to use his Gate of Valhalla spell, Rista pleads with him to not sacrifice himself. Knowing that (and the Chained Oblivion effect) will permanently kill himself, Seiya still casts it. The Demon Lord is locked away after a struggle, and Seiya is on death’s door. Breaking yet another divine rule, Rista conjures all of the goddess magic she has in order to heal Seiya, and it works. The gang momentarily celebrates, but the Demon Lord manages to break out of the gate. This time, he aims to pull everyone — including the whole world — into the void gate with him. Seiya has no choice but to cast the gate spell once more, and this time, Rista cannot bring him back. Before Seiya dies, he leaves Elulu and Mash with some encouraging words. Finally, he starts to remember his past life with Rista, and tells her he was glad he could save her this time. Seiya vanishes in Rista’s arms.

Rista leaves Elulu and Mash with Rosalie and goes to face her punishment in the Divine Realm. Ishtar declares that her punishment will include saving a “double S-ranked” world, as well as having no access to her healing magic there. However, she also explains that since Seiya’s initial gate spell had sucked up the Chained Oblivion, Seiya did not permanently die and was able to go back to his world. She chooses to summon him all over again.

Our Take

That’s all, folks!

…Or is it?

The ending definitely paves the way for another season. It was good to see that they managed to work in all the mechanics of death in the last episode. The twist where Seiya managed to eliminate the Chained Oblivion effect was pretty well done, because he didn’t have a “Gary Stu” ending where he powers through and comes out unscathed. It wound up being a very fair, well-rounded ending to the season. However, knowing that Seiya will return to his world without any memory of ever being summoned to the Divine Realm or saving Gaebrande, it may put the storytelling quality in jeopardy.

Cautious Hero: The Hero is Overpowered but Overly Cautious may have had a decent ending, but it took a lot of repetitive episodes to get to that point — so much so that it’s unclear if a typical audience member would maintain enough interest to get to that ending. A typical episode usually goes, “Hey Seiya, be good aligned!” “No, I’m going to burn down a village to ensure the safety of the world.” “Oh you!” If Seiya comes back with his memory gone next season, it leaves a lot of room for an unfortunate repetition of this — again. It’s always a bit painful when a character actually experiences character development only for it to be retconned somehow. Hopefully, this won’t be the case. Maybe Seiya will have memory-jogs — or maybe he’ll recall his past life in totality.

Rista’s voice actress (who was already the best VA in the show) still kept her versatility to the end. Seiya’s character finally got to emote a bit, so that definitely added to the performance. The emotion between Rista and Seiya seemed almost anticlimactic, though, considering what we watched in the previous episode — but hey, perfection is not a Cautious Hero quality.

In any case, the finale (and episode eleven) were definitely the best parts of the show. If it gets another season, maybe they’ll maintain that quality and stop being so…cautious.