The Winter 2026 Anime Preview Guide

There Was a Cute Girl in the Hero's Party, So I Tried Confessing to Her

Yōki is a man reincarnated into a fantasy world. Yōki did not reincarnate as a hero or the demon lord, but as the demon lord's underling. When a hero's party attacks the demon lord's castle, Yōki is naturally there to fight against the heroes. However, when he sees the priest Cecilia, who is part of the hero's party, he falls in love at first sight.

There Was a Cute Girl in the Hero's Party, So I Tried Confessing to Her is based on Suisei 's Yūsha Party ni Kawaii Ko ga Itanode, Kokuhaku Shite Mita (There Was a Cute Girl in the Hero's Party, So I Tried Confessing to Her) light novel series. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Tuesdays.

Do opposites truly attract? Can men and women ever really understand each other? Will the Demon King's loyal soldier and the cute healer from the hero's party find love in a hopeless place? There Was a Cute Girl in the Hero's Party, So I Tried Confessing to Her is the anime that dares to tackle all of these questions and…well, I was going to finish the cliche with “...and more!”, but, no, it's mostly just those ones that I already mentioned. In other words, this is yet another rom-com in a season that is shockingly overflowing with saccharine shenanigans—except this one is running with the shtick where it pairs up two classic, opposing archetypes from some other popular fantasy subgenre. It's like if The Demon Girl Next Door was terminally heterosexual, nowhere near as funny, and animated with a budget presumably consisting of whatever lost coins Studio Gekkō could scrounge up from the crevices beneath their office's vending machines.

Okay, that last jab was maybe a little too harsh. There Was a Cute Girl in the Hero's Party doesn't look hideous or anything, but between the studio's two productions of the season, this show looks noticeably more stiff and slapdash than Tune In to the Midnight Heart—and it's not like Tune In is much of a looker to begin with. Still, this isn't the end of the world. While pleasing movement, stylish colors, and compelling storyboards are, you know, pretty important to the whole “animation” concept, an anime like this can still get by if its romantic leads can muster the laughs and the squeals of lovey-dovey catharsis from its audience. Ideally, we'd get both in equal measure, but any port in a storm will do at the end of the day.

This is where I have to be the bearer of bad news and report that Yoki and Cecilia are not a strong enough pair to carry the burden of the show's success on their collective shoulders. The biggest problem with Yoki is that being an evil dude with a demon horn is literally the only quality that makes him stand apart from your average Potato-kun protagonist; so, once he snaps that horn off to infiltrate the hero's guild and get close to Cecilia, the dude has nothing going for him. As for Cecilia, well, so far as I can tell, the appeal of her character is that she…has blue hair? Honestly, I'm at a loss. Sure, I could also mention that she's vaguely “nice” in that abstract, “We stole this character's design and concept wholesale from a catalogue of royalty-free RPG Maker assets” sort of way, but let's not get crazy here. We are under no obligation give this show credit for achieving the bare minimum of sketching out a vague outline of a personality that any kid playing her first D&D campaign could do—even if she was scrambling to fill out the character sheet in the scant few minutes her DM needs to set up his screen and lay out all of the pretzel snacks his Mom bought special for game night.

I am resorting to extended, jokey analogies because There Was a Cute Girl in the Hero's Party doesn't give us much to work with, in its own right. It is a romantic comedy that is neither particularly romantic nor particularly funny. It is an anime that isn't very well animated. The show is at least trying, a little bit, which is more than some of the competition can claim, but the Preview Guide is a fickle mistress. The best I can do when it comes to pity points is maybe an extra half-star.

Oh no, it's stealth isekai! Not that that's particularly surprising; with these “hero's party” stories, there's always a fifty-fifty chance it'll be either isekai or LitRPG, and in this case, the whole “isekai” bit doesn't factor into things too much. Yoki is a demon, but he's quick to tell his crush, Cecilia, that he's only demonic on the outside because he's been reborn, and he used to be a human. A cringey human if the few behaviors he attributes to his previous life are to be believed. So, suffice it to say, there's probably a very pat backstory to this one, and one we're probably fine without ever knowing.

Yoki being a demon also doesn't seem like it's going to be a big deal, and that's a little more disappointing. Shortly after allowing the hero's party, sans Cecilia, to get past him to kill the demon king, Yoki rips off his own horn and wings to pretend to be human to better get close to the girl of his dreams. Somehow, this also changes the shape of his pupils? They never get into that, but he also doesn't seem to bleed or scar from his self-surgeries, so I think we can safely assume that this isn't a show that's going to sweat the details. Any details.

It's also not nearly as creepy as it could have been, given that the inciting incident is Yoki sending the rest of the hero's party off to potentially die so he can ask his crush out. (Something, I daresay, that the other lady in the group, Mikana, would have been fine with. Cecilia has no idea how close she came to that other kind of story about a hero's party.) But Yoki takes Cecilia's initial rejection well, instead taking her up on her offer to help him leave the demon lord's castle and start a new life. He's still in love with her, but he's going to respect her wishes and pace, which wins him points with her mom.

Underneath the boilerplate elements, unattractive character designs, and uninspired animation, this might be something sweet. But you'll have to sort through a lot of chaff to get there, and this might be one of those shows you go back to in a slow season or just put on for mild background noise.

There Was a Cute Girl in the Hero's Party, So I Tried Confessing to Her, with its mouthful of a title, was clearly written with the best of intentions, but the first episode's pivotal scene made my skin crawl just a teeny tiny bit. The protagonist Youki sends the hero's party away, asking that only the healer Cecilia stay behind so that he can ask her out. He explains that he's really a human from another world at heart, not an evil demon, and he's just performing the role he was born to do. She gives him a speech about using his great power to make the world better instead of supporting evil, inspiring him to stop supporting the Demon Lord.

If it hadn't been totally obvious from the get-go, this would have been the scene that confirmed to me that no woman touched this story from draft to publication. Separating a girl from her group to hit on her, in a situation where you have all the power? Bad move, Youki. I've been in that situation, and no amount of “I swear I'm actually a nice guy” explanations will make me feel safe or receptive to the guy's advances. Yeah, as an audience member, I know that Youki's intentions are pure, but Cecilia has no reason to believe that. She just knows that she's trapped in a room alone with a man who, per all evidence up to that point, intends to harm her.

This made me even less receptive to Youki as a protagonist than I would have been otherwise. I don't know why this series needed to be isekai, either; series about what comes after the hero's party defeats the Demon Lord usually aren't, and it doesn't seem to be adding anything to the narrative. However, overall, I am more receptive to these kinds of stories than other game-inspired fantasy anime, since the best ones usually have a touch of delicious melancholy as they explore what comes after the credits roll. Indeed, now that the human nations are no longer working together to defeat the Demon Lord, they've started to pursue competing interests that may lead to much greater conflict. I actually quite like Cecilia; she's clearly smart and principled, intelligent enough to see where the world is going and strong-willed enough to try to head it off.

But man, I don't like her relationship with Youki. After she asks him to leave the guild to avoid drawing attention to himself and accidentally intensifying global conflicts, her mother pulls him aside. She asks if he intends to marry her. Her hyperfocus on her daughter's romantic prospects brings back the bad feelings from that first scene with the two alone, with a clunky transition as a bonus. I'm getting the sense that the story is trying to hold two thoughts in its head, but will end up doing a poor job of intertwining them.

Love the Adventurers' Guild dude, though. No more perky anime girl receptionists, just a guy who treats his job with all the passion of your average DMV employee. Much more real.