Cautious Hero is yet another one of those isekai that have flooded the market because of Sword Art Online and in its attempt to stand out in this more than saturated subgenre that copy-pastes each other’s ideas with little to no variation, it went for the comedy routine. The guy who is summoned to another world in order to save it is overpowered as hell, which is a most typical element, but he is also ridiculously cautious, which makes him obnoxious to the people around him, despite that being the reason he constantly wins. And that is the only thought the author had while writing the script. The entire premise and plot are right there in the long ass title most light novels are notorious for. There is not much differentiation across its arcs; some powerful monster appears, the hero is constantly refusing to fight it because he is not sure, he runs away in order to train, and comes back with a strategy that wins the fight. And by strategy, I mean some overpowered ability that he conveniently learned in a few days just for the occasion. Don’t assume there is any actual strategy in the plot; it’s all basic fighting shonen stuff. As a result, the plot is predictable, the comedy is repetitive, and the characters are one-note. The comedy becomes stale after a few episodes, because the protagonist is the only character who matters. Everybody else is there just for getting shocked with whatever he is doing, or for training him into becoming even more overpowered. The reaction shots of the goddess and the deadpan face of the protagonist can be quite hilarious at first, but it doesn’t take long before you start feeling bored with the lack of variety. Konosuba, another very light in plot comical isekai, is far more memorable just by having more than one characters who matter and it achieves that by not making any of them stronger than all the rest put together. Because that’s what the Cautious Hero did, and as a result the two kids who are in the same team as the protagonist have nothing to do, no matter how much they train. It even becomes an in-joke as they end up doing nothing more than chores, which can be funny for a couple of times, but then it gets stale because nothing changes and they never offer anything other than reaction shots.The last two episodes try to change things a bit by shoehorning a lot of drama into the mix, but it came too late to make a difference and on top of that it was forced. There was no reason for all that to be hidden from the viewer, much less the protagonist and his teammates, and as such it feels like it’s something they threw in there at the last moment. They could have kept it as part of the protagonists’ characterization since the very beginning. His often asshole-ish behavior would have been far more enriched and he wouldn’t come off as a one-gag character. So it’s a misfire that ended the show on a bad note. Stick only to the comedy part.And speaking of the comedy, even if you don’t get bored with how repetitive it is, you still need to like the type of humor it’s implementing. Being faithful to its origins as a crappy isekai, it’s something that will be best appreciated by horny gamers. Because there is nothing intellectual about it; it’s just ridiculous facial expressions, sexual innuendo, and vulgarity. And let’s not forget the videogame terminology. Magic and levels and statistic screens straight out of a generic Dragon Quest game. As a whole, there is zero creativity, no variety, and the ending is kinda crap, thus it’s not a show worth watching for more than a couple of episodes.
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