Cautious Hero: The Hero is Overpowered but Overly Cautious – Episode 1

What’s it about? If she can find and guide a hero to rescue one more world, the rookie goddess Ristarte (“Rista”) will be promoted to full divinity. The problem is that she draws an S-Class world, one so troubled that even gods who have saved hundreds of worlds would have a hard time with it. Luckily for her, she finds and summons Ryuuguuin Seiya, a young Japanese man with astronomical base stats. Unluckily for her, Seiya is so cautious he can barely function!

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First anime of the new season for me, and of course it’s an isekai. Of course. But still, I have to give Cautious Hero some credit. Okay, a lot of credit. This first episode was actually incredibly fun. It knows where the show’s most entertaining qualities lie and just how to bring them out.

There’s not really much to Seiya. He has two personality traits: paranoid and brusque. When Rista tells him that he’s been isekai’d, he shows no enthusiasm or excitement, just locks himself in a room to do push-ups to prepare for a week.

When they encounter a Level 1 slime, he hits it with three high-power special attacks, continuing long after it’s a smoking crater. There’s really only one joke to him.

No, the real star of this episode is Rista, and I’m glad to see everyone involved in the production seems to realize that. From her first moments running away from the gacha ceremony screaming about the task in front of her, she lights up every moment on-screen.

She’s already frazzled enough about such an important milestone hinging on such a monumental task, and then Seiya comes along and completely destroys her composure. The animation staff focuses mainly on expressing that through character animation and storyboarding, rather than showing off her boobs in her admittedly skimpy dress.

Rista’s gag-anime energy gels wonderfully with Seiya’s straight-man nature. Their relationship plays with expectations a bit as well, since Seiya has no apparent interest in Rista’s divinely curvy figure while Rista is super horny for his hot bod.

Even as he drives her nuts, she can’t stop staring at all those damn muscles, because he insists on working out, even just stripping his shirt off and doing push-ups in the middle of the floor. He irritably tells her to stop staring at him a couple times, but there’s little sense of violence or violation like there is when a male character walks in on or peeps at a female character.

Not that this show isn’t horny about its female characters. Rista’s dress, with its thigh-bearing length and enormous boob keyhole cutout, leaves little to the imagination. And yet it’s somehow one of the more modest female costumes, judging from the opening theme. Still, the first episode only has a couple instances of obtrusive fanservice shots, and it’s more than outweighed by everything else about Rista.

I’m not sure how Cautious Hero will unfold as the series goes on. I can see the central gag of Seiya’s paranoia and disproportionate responses getting old quickly. His and Rista’s relationship could also become repetitive if there’s not a shift in dynamic soon. Still, this premiere was the most fun I’ve had watching a single episode of anime in quite a while, so I’m going to stay cautiously optimistic.