Not only is this show getting a same-day dub on release, we open with an action-packed, hour-long episode. This means it’s good, right? Well, I dunno. Let’s not get too ahead of ourselves. The first episode is better than what I expected going in, but the show still doesn’t really excite me. Not yet. Not until we see whether or not these characters have any depth to them. ‘Cause right now, they’re still just concepts — concepts that have been remixed, but concepts nonetheless. What do I mean by this? Well, we have all the familiar terminology, i.e. “heroes,” “goddesses”, “demon lords,” etc. But their usage is slightly different.
These days, anime “heroes” are usually dorks who have been isekai’d from modern Japan in order to save some fantasy land from the dastardly demon lord. On paper, anyways. On paper, that’s what they’re supposed to do. In practice, our heroes are typically pathetic, undersexed middle-aged salarymen praying for a release from their sad, dreary lives. As such, all they ever do on these “adventures” of theirs is form a harem of hot anime babes, maybe whine about the goddess, and if they’re lucky, live through five to six seasons of gathering even more hot anime babes.
In Sentenced to Be a Hero, however, heroes are actually criminals. If you’ve committed a grave crime like, oh I dunno, murdering a goddess, then you will be branded a “hero,” and forced to serve, i.e. press-ganged into suicidal missions where death is no solace. After all, they — this nebulous “they” that represents these cloaked figures — can simply blow your head off, resurrect you, burn you at the stake, then probably resurrect you again for another mission because pawns are ever so useful. Why would you just let them die? It’s basically fantasy slavery to the extreme. So why call them “heroes” at all? Just so we can use a terminology that anime viewers are familiar with? That’s the part that I’m not a big fan of, but whatever. Perhaps I’m nitpicking.
Likewise, goddesses here a little different from what we’re used to. In other shows, goddesses are the ones who do the isekai-ing of the heroes. They’re the reason why we have heroes at all! In recent times, however, these dime-a-dozen shows try to be “unique” and “creative,” so they’ll position the goddess character as the actual arc villain of the series. The goddesses will be conniving and power hungry. She usually looks down on her subjects, and cruelly manipulates them for her own ends. As a result, the hero must slay his goddess in order to return home (usually with a bevy of hot anime babes in tow)!
But is Sentenced to Be a Hero even an isekai? I see no evidence for it… yet. In any case, the goddesses here don’t appear to do any summoning. Rather, they seem to be just another tool in a seemingly never-ending war against the demon lords’ forces — “weapons built long ago to fight demon lords.” Sure, they are revered and respected on the surface by the rank and file soldiers. As such, it’s a huge crime to murder one. But if our protagonist Xylo is right about his former unit and goddess being betrayed by the powers that be, then surely goddesses aren’t quite as sacred as we’re initially led to believe. So again, they’re just tools to be used and eventually discarded in the long run. And judging by Teoritta’s constant desire to be praised and head-patted like the typical female anime character that she is, they seem almost robotic — as if they were explicitly designed to be used for a singular purpose and thus can’t conceive of a life beyond said purpose. Fight in the war, get praised, desire to fight even harder, so on and so forth. It sounds like Xylo’s previous goddess Senerva burnt out the short wick of her life going through that exact feedback loop.
Last but not least, there’s always this eternal conflict against a shadowy demon lord. We usually know next to nothing about said enigmatic figure unless a show is, again, lucky enough to get five or six seasons’ worth of middling episodes. And even then, the demon lord is rarely anything special unless they’re the actual protagonist themselves. In that case, we either get a demon lord who is really just a hero in disguise, or we get an edgy anime that basically screams, “Look at us, we’re so morally gray! We kill people!”
Well, as you might expect, demon lords are used differently in Sentenced to Be a Hero. I mean, we’ve already switched things up with heroes and goddesses, so why not do the same with the concept of demon lords? As such, there isn’t just one demon lord here. Instead, there are multiples, and our hero Xylo has already killed plenty. Not only that, demon lords aren’t even charismatic, humanoid villains here. Rather, they’re towering monstrosities with the power to corrupt every living thing within their vicinity. We get a lot of corrupted frogs in this episode. I guess there were just a lot of frogs in the area (insert joke about France here). For some reason, our heroes refer to these corrupted creatures as faeries, but the name doesn’t matter. They’re still just twisted animals at the end of the day. Nothing is spared. That includes goddesses, by the way. In fact, Xylo’s only crime isn’t really a crime at all! He was only trying to prevent his previous goddess from turning into a demon lord herself.
So far, if there’s a weak link in this show, it’s the monsters. They’re just… not very interesting. At one point, Xylo mentions how the 47th demon lord is actually strategically intelligent. Apparently, it knows how to flank its enemy. But at the end of the day, all I see is a thoughtless, voiceless monster that gets killed rather easily. The monsters here are not interesting nor scary. They don’t tickle the brain stem like, say, the God Hands in Berserk. But it’s only the first episode. The true evil behind these demon lords, if they even exist, have yet to reveal themselves. After all, Xylo seems more hellbent on hunting down the people who set him up than fighting against demon lords.
But like I said up top, so far, these are just concepts. It remains to be seen if our hero Xylo, our goddess Teoritta, and the bevy of demon lords will have hidden, greater depths to them. Last summer, we had Clevatess, an action-packed show that started out somewhat promisingly. But in the end, it never made me honestly care about its characters. It had no real drama. The relationships between the them were threadbare at best, and the primary conflict was wholly unforgettable. To add insult to injury, Clevatess‘s animation quality fell off a cliff so it couldn’t even lean on the action to carry it. So sure, Sentenced to Be a Hero‘s first episode might have looked pretty damn slick, but it’ll take more than that to hold my attention. I assume Xylo doesn’t want Teoritta to die like his first goddess. Clevatess did a poor job of developing Clen’s relationship with Luna, because it was always in a hurry to throw us into the next action-packed conflict. I hope Sentenced to Be a Hero won’t repeat that same mistake.
Stray thoughts & observations:
- Dotta appears to be the wimpy side character who just wants to steal stuff and die when the going gets tough. In his eyes, they can just resurrect him. But Xylo keeps telling the kid to live on, because you can lose your sense of self through the repeated cycle of dying and resurrecting. But if your life is this shitty, why cling so desperately to this sense of self? What comfort does it give you as you go from one life to the next? Wouldn’t you rather just wipe the slate clean each time you die rather than keep all these horrible memories? Well, Xylo has a revenge mission that he doesn’t want to forget. But can Dotta say the same?
- Apparently, their mission is to try and keep at least 50% of the holy knights alive. Unfortunately, the holy knights are a bunch of honor-bound dunderheads.
- There better not be a girl in that coffin. Sigh, there’s gonna be a girl in there…
- …yup, there’s girl in there. A goddess, too.
- Teoritta’s lit ahoge makes her look like a bomb that’s about to go off. Or the flame of a short-lived candle. Probably the latter.
- Our goddess seems to have the ability to summon enough swords to make even Gilgamesh blush.
- Maybe Kivia will be the hardass soldier whose heart eventually thaws over the course of the series. For now, they kinda suck.
- Why was Xylo so hellbent on saving Kivia’s men? Was it because he had been betrayed? Does he think they wanted to sacrifice Kivia the same way they tried to sacrifice him? Hmm.
