The Spring 2023 Anime Preview Guide

The Legendary Hero is Dead!

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.

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.