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The Spring 2023 Anime Preview Guide
The Legendary Hero is Dead!

How would you rate episode 1 of
The Legendary Hero is Dead! ?
Community score: 3.2



What is this?

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Touka is just your average (slightly perverted) farmer in the village of Cheza. While he daydreams about being a hero and getting the girl, the real hero, Sion, is out battling demons that threaten to invade the world! But one day, Touka accidentally kills the hero…?! With the Legendary Hero dead, who's going to save the world now?! Touka quickly buries Sion's body to hide the evidence but wakes up the next day to discover he is no longer in his own body…!!

The Legendary Hero is Dead! is based on Subaruichi 's The Legendary Hero is Dead! (Yūsha ga Shinda! Murabito no Ore ga Hotta Otoshiana ni Yuusha ga Ochita Kekka) manga and streams on Crunchyroll on Thursdays.


How was the first episode?

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James Beckett
Rating:

I'll give The Legendary Hero is Dead! credit for two things, if nothing else: One, its opening theme is catchy as heck, and that's always a positive. Also, the incredibly stupid joke that opens this show's premiere did manage to make me chuckle, despite myself. Not the whole running gag about hero Touka being unhealthily obsessed with putting stockings on anything that even remotely resembles a human woman's thigh, such as a radish. That is the kind of sophomorically lame joke that I have mostly outgrown. That said, when childhood friend Yuna admonishes Touka for being the only pervert in the world who'd get his jollies off to a dressed-up radish, and a couple of bystanders instinctively hide their own stocking'd vegetables in shame? Yeah, that was pretty funny.

It's a shame that the rest of the show never managed to get a laugh out of me again, though I can't hold it against The Legendary Hero is Dead! too much. For an anime comedy to produce even one audible exhalation of air from my lungs is a gift to be appreciated during the onslaught of Preview Guide. I still haven't recovered from the Great KamiKatsu Disaster of This Past Wednesday.

We ought to be clear about something right up front: The Legendary Hero is Dead! isn't trying to be high art, and it doesn't care who knows it. The whole premise is about a lecherous loser and his impatient but constantly underdressed best friend having to cover for the fact that they accidentally murdered the world's most legendary hero. Am I taking it easy on this proudly vacuous anime for being functionally tolerable when compared to some of the worst anime premieres I've ever seen in recent memory? Probably, but when a shrill slapstick sitcom manages to make it to the end credits without literally hurting my brain with its obnoxiousness, I'm willing to call the experience…well, not a “win”…no, this anime cannot reasonably be declared to have “won” at anything.

How about we call it an “Only-Kind-of-Loser”? Yeah, that feels about right. The Legendary Hero is Dead! is the kind of anime that would probably get corny teenagers to double over with laughter and repeat the same silly jokes over and over for weeks on end, which means that it definitely sucks at least a little bit. But they deserve their anime just as much as anyone, though, so I won't deny The Legendary Hero is Dead! a spot at the table. It's a spot at the kids' table, where the only thing to eat is day-old cheese pizza, but it's a spot at a table, nonetheless.


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Richard Eisenbeis
Rating:

The Legendary Hero is Dead! is your typical “everyone's terrible” type of comedy. All the characters have major personality flaws: Touka is lazy, envious, and lecherous. Yuna is vain and shallow. Kyle is jealous and self-centered. Even Anri, the best of the bunch, has basically enslaved a man in a zombie body just because she believes that the one who killed the hero (even accidentally) is the only one who can take his job.

And as with all “everyone's terrible” comedies, the humor comes from watching bad things happen to bad people. Every good thing that happens to Touka in particular is simply so that he has further to fall when karma comes around to kick him in the butt. In addition to this, there is also a fair amount of sexual humor in this one—though pretty much every joke ends with Touka getting his zombie eye punched out of its socket.

While most of the humor didn't land for me, there were two jokes that actually got me laughing. Both revolve around Touka's excuse for putting a stocking on a turnip—that no man could resist doing that to a perfect thigh. The first is Yuna's rebuttal that Touka's the only man that would do that before cutting to two random passersby with there own socking-clad turnips looking embarrassed. Then a scene later when Touka is checking out Yuna's thighs, it jump-cuts to him suddenly putting a stocking on Yuna as well, proving that he wasn't lying.

Simply put, The Legendary Hero is Dead! is one of those shows that lives or dies based on its comedy. And as comedy is inherently (not to mention wildly) subjective, the best way to judge whether this one is for you or not is to watch it for yourself. While I wouldn't call this show bad, I would definitely say it's not for me.


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Nicholas Dupree
Rating:

If you want to know if you'll love or hate this premiere, look no further than the first scene after the opening theme. In that scene, our lecherous hero plucks a healthy daikon radish from the ground, declares its name Katherine, and proceeds to drool as he sensually slides a stocking up the vegetable's juicy gam. If that sounds like a hilarious notion that tickles your funny bone, then go right ahead and enjoy this episode. If you're like me, however, and that sequence of events made your eyes roll out of your head, then turn away now because there is nothing but the rotted corpses of jokes waiting for you beyond.

There's not a whole lot else I can say, honestly. This is a comedy where the joke is that every character is a belligerent, stupid asshole. They're all on a journey to have extremely tired comedic encounters with stock fantasy tropes. Our hero is a worthless pervert who obsesses over women's thighs and immediately uses his stolen identity to trick his female “friend” into wearing sexy outfits for him. Said friend is a shallow idiot who exists to “comically” beat the hero up for being a pervert whenever the camera isn't focusing in on her thighs or cleavage. Every other character is a paper-thin prop who's just as obnoxious and unlikable. They spend the entire episode yelling at each other about it before finishing things off with the world's most obvious visual gag for impotence. They don't even have any good gags about their hero being a zombie, which is the easiest joke in the world!

It's a style of comedy that I might have found amusing as a teenager, but now I spent the entire episode stone-faced, just waiting for it to be over. I wasn't even offended because this show is competently put together compared to the phoned-in isekai trainwrecks from previous premieres. It's just repetitive, unfunny comedy that keeps going at the same pace, with the same punchlines, for its entire runtime. There's no twist, spin, or anything unexpected—just the anime equivalent of a bad Monty Python sketch, and about as memorable.


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