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[series:4883#628] | ||||||
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(All episodes watched): 'This show might just be a winner!' I said to myself while watching episode one. I was surprised by the 3D animation but quickly got used to it. There was a sort of sly, understated humor to the plot (if I'm not imagining things) which left me smiling throughout the show and laughing out loud at times. Lin Ling (this seems to be a Chinese series) is drafted to serve as a hero and quickly adapts to the job. The plot was deeper than most, with Lin Ling's philosophy of just what a hero is and the threat at one point that he may give in to the dark impulses that make a person a villain rather than a hero. The fact that the original Nice killed himself and what happens to Moon, his girlfriend/heroine partner, suggests that there's something funny going on in the Hero business. I wish the rules by which Heroes operate had been made more clear, but with a little research it seems that this show is a sequel of an earlier one that I didn't watch. But if it's as good as this one is looking, then perhaps I will. 'This is ----ing awesome" is what I said to myself at the end of episode two. The shocking fate of Moon that we were shown at the end of episode one turns out to be a dream or something, but that's OK because what actually becomes of her was clever and amusing. She has figured out that this is not the same Nice as she has known for three years, and at any rate their relationship was nothing but an act to please the fans. Their domineering manager, 'Miss J', demands that they come to some sort of understanding and continue to play their parts. Lin Ling/Nice comes up with a tragic end for Moon that will involve his own archenemy, but it turns out that this person has lost a good deal of his mind and won't just be pretending to try to kill Nice. Meanwhile, 'Enlighter', who was behind the fracas in episode one, has figured out what has happened in regards to the true identity of Nice. The plot of this show races forward farther in one episode than most do it three or six. I was left giggling at the promise of more of this premium grade entertainment on the way. This is looking like my favorite show of the season. Episode three wasn't as good, however. Nice's manager's next goal is for him to break into the top ten Heroes, which will require unseating 'Firm Man', an ex-fireman (I was amused by the manager's cynical remark about 'what does even more harm than violence?'). But it was easy to guess the identity of his nemesis 'Wolf Girl' (each Hero seems to have an anti-hero), and I didn't get why this girl would turn on the man who once saved her life. And why did it matter so much if a statue of Firm Man was destroyed? The first two episodes had seemed to be brilliantly thought-out, but this one didn't make a whole lot of sense. Thankfully, episode four was more like one and two. Enlighter has somehow found Moon and threatens to kill her if Nice won't come and fight him on his terms. Nice wants to do so, but his fans urge him not to take the bait (don't they care about Moon?) which drains him of his superpowers. He goes to meet Enlighter nevertheless, and takes a brutal beating until the fact that the fight is being covered live allows him to regain his abilities. Lin Ling is forced to come clean with the public about his real relationship to the original Nice, however. And Moon's 'rescue' does not do her much good for very long. One thought that occured to me: who is the young but white-haired guy who gets more time than Nice in the OP sequence? Despite what happened to Moon, I was disappointed that Lin Ling does not appear at all in episode five--I hope his story isn't over. Instead we meet Yang Ching, an orphan who was once rescued by the Hero known as 'E-Soul' and has always hoped to become a Hero himself but has never been able to earn a single 'trust' from anyone (the hero power you can utilize depends on having these). Yang Ching is an interesting character, what with his secret love of prestigious classmate Xia Qing, but I would rather we remain with Lin Ling. Maybe the two will cooperate at the climax of this show. Passers-by recorded Yang Ching's valiant fight to rescue Xia Qing's little brother, and it goes viral, resulting in a surge in public trust for him. Thanks in part to the capable management of Yang Chao (who is both a friend and a rival for the attention of Xia Qing), Yang Ching's career as a Hero takes off under the name 'New E-Soul'. Before long he is making inroads into the trust supply of the original E-Soul. He is framed but exonerated by an unlikely person from the first arc, which I found intriguing. Episode six ends with a shocking murder--these seem to be fairly commonplace in this show. In episode seven Yang Ching/New E-Soul challenges original E-Soul (who he apparently suspects was behind the murder) to a duel. Something strange happens at the climax of the episode, but I was confused regarding exactly what the significance was. 'Uncle Rock', a relative of Xia Qing, is actually a nefarious plotter--or was there a new character who happened to look a good deal like him? Perhaps I was not paying close enough attention as a lengthy battle dragged onwards. It was hard to tell the two contestants apart, and tell who was winning and losing, since they wear similar costumes. And, as seems to be typical with this show, the second arc cuts off abruptly and frustratingly and a third one begins in episode eight. 'Cyan' is a girl who was the sole survivor of a jet airliner crash, was found by a reporter and turned over to an orphanage. Somehow, she possesses amazing good luck (probably why she survived the plane crash) and can convey her good luck onto others--like the girl who showed her photos of three potential boyfriends and asked her to choose the one who would make her the most happy. She builds up a lot of trust from all the people who she has helped. The orphanage also has a boy (Luo, I think) who is notorious for the bad luck that seems to fall upon anyone who associates with him. Just where this was going wasn't clear to me after this episode, but it seemed like it might be fun. But I wouldn't describe it as "----ing awesome" anymore, due in large part to the disjointed arcs. Anyway, in episode nine Cyan and Luo are separated, and she loses her Hero powers (I guess because everyone thinks she has betrayed them by running away), but, starting from scratch, she rebuilds them and becomes a famous singer. All the while she refuses to give up hope that Luo is still alive, and if he can't become a Hero like he wanted, she will. But episode ten made little sense to me. Something about people who were once associated with Cyan are now experiencing extremely bad luck, because they are only exposed to Luo now, I suppose. This causes Cyan's Trust Index to plunge, but a revelation about what really happened on the airplane fixes everything. We learn where Cyan's power came from but not Luo's counter-power. It's a tricky business when superpowers are basically bestowed via a sort of popularity contest. Luo and numerous others are possessed by a sort of counter-trust, or Fear, which turns them into something like zombies(?). Fear was mentioned way back in the first arc, and now it is recognized by the authorities as a serious problem. But again this made little sense to me and I hope this arc is finished. There are a number of characters in the OP sequence who have yet to appear. In episode 11 the white-haired but cool looking guy who has dominated the OP sequence finally appears. Nobody knows his name, yet he rockets to the position of Hero X, the greatest hero. We meet Brave, a girl who is determined to become Hero X herself and graduates from college at age 14 to speed the process up. Several characters we already know reappear as well. I found this episode to be confusing; it seemed at first that this would be Brave's arc, or maybe Bowa's (another female fighter), but this mysterious guy makes short work of them. Is he really a Hero or a Villain? There is no record of him ever doing anything exemplary. Maybe despite being humiliated early on, Brave (now known as 'Queen'--right?) and Bowa will discover that he's not a Hero at all and bring him down. But of course this show tends to operate in short three-or-so-episode arcs. So, again, confusing. In episode 12 Bowa has gotten the idea that Queen cheated in a Hero ranking match with her and attacks her in private. It would seem that Bowa has become an anti-Hero, powered by fear rather than hope and trust. Not much is clarified by this episode. In episode 13 a new arc takes off with a new hero candidate, Lily. Lily really wants to become a hero, but she is a cute, pink-haired girl and it is assumed that being cute also means you are relatively weak and therefore couldn't be a decent hero. Lily exercises as much as she can plus designs a power suit to multiply her strength. Her father, Professor Luo, is against this hero business but satisfies Lily by giving her a job in his lab where even better power suits might be created. I couldn't help feeling that to a certain extent the story behind the series as a whole is drifting without a clear plot; perhaps it would be better to expand on one or two of the heroes that have already been introduced than keep introducing more and more of them then leaving their stories incomplete. What about the white-haired guy? Will all these separate stories come together at the end, or what? Anyway, in episode 14 a former Hero X has been employed by someone to break into Professor Luo's lab and steal the secret substance being studied there--Fear--the anti-hero making material. Especially interesting was the source of this stuff: the Professor says it was "gathered from the wreckage of an alien spaceship that crashed many years ago" . Episode 15 is about the unemotional hero Ghostblade, who comes from a family of butchers and took that profession one step farther by becoming a professional assassin for a while before getting married and becoming a hero instead. It turns out that he is involved in Lily's story--he is the stalker who Lily rescued a friend, Luoluo, from or at least that's what it seemed like to her. Also, Ghostblade is assigned to escort professor Luo as he returns to the crashsite. Episode 16 is sort of a comedy as Ghostblade finds himself accompanying Lily and Luoluo, who definitely do not trust him, on the expedition to the crash site. Luoluo is under the impression that her father is long dead when in fact he is none other than Ghostblade. I hadn't realized that Ghostblade is unable to talk for some reason. In episode 17 we learn the story of Little Johnny, another hero accompanying the mission, and his strange animal aide, 'Big Johnny'. At the start of the episode Little Johnny seems to board the wrecked spacecraft by himself—then something happens to him. Little Johnny struggles to understand Ghostblade, with sometimes comic results. Some sort of conspiracy is underway among the powerful regarding this Fear substance, but I was having a hard time grasping it. It's like the invention of nuclear weapons, with every country scrambling to have some lest they be rendered at the mercy of those that do. In episode 19 we are told that the mission was attacked, using Fear (was there a bit after the credits at the end of episode six?) but the emotionless Ghostblade fought it off. Things approach a critical point: Ghostblade actually has another secret mission, to kill Big Johnny, but just when he's about to do so a bevy of additional heroes show up, including E-Soul, Lily in her fighting suit, and, of all people, Nice! So he hasn't been discarded from the plot after all. In short, a wild situation in which I can only guess who's on what side. But it seemed like the writers knew what they were doing, and I remained intrigued. Episode 20 is about the 'Ruin Incident', a series of confused fights between Heroes defending professor Luo and Heroes trying to kill him. It turns out that Nice isn't nice at all—he's fighting for the Fear faction. Lily fights valiantly to protect her father. The results are indecisive (Heroes seldom get killed) but the bad guys seem to have gained the upper hand. One result is that the next competition for Hero X is cancelled and white-haired guy will retain the title by default. Other than showing up for the tournaments, this guy seems to remain in hiding the rest of the time. If I didn't misunderstand something, he actually has black hair, which we see when 'Hero Smile'--he smiles all the time and knows where Hero X lives—pays him a visit in episode 21. Another Hero, or anti-hero, is 'Dragon Boy', who is part of a plot to take down Hero Smile. Paradoxically, this guy seems to get stronger and stronger as he is mercilessly beaten. He provokes opponents to assault him then piles up strength until he launches a devastating counter-attack. In episode 22 Smile and Dragon Boy are at a draw when Nice shows up and can tip the balance—but he has second thoughts about which side he's on (This must be the original Nice, the one that Lin Ling replaces, because he isn't very). X himself appears in order to to settle this fight. This episode made me reconsider the series as a whole; What the fuck is going on here? It almost seems like the writers of this show keep starting a new plot, then decide they have a better idea, and abandon that plot to pursue this new one, and it goes on and on. Holy crap---I stumbled across an attempt at ANN to put events in this story in chronological order, and apparently there is also a host of specials and movies and whatnot. I got the impression that just watching this series would leave you with less than half of the overall material--no wonder it seems to bounce around. A new arc begins in episode 23 with an unlikely new hero--Ahu, a intelligent dog who is adopted by a poor girl who needs a hero to protect her grandmother from being run out of her home by a shady real estate organization. Almost the entire episode takes place in a superdeformed mode of animation. It was actually X who saved the day, but Ahu gets the credit. How did Ahu manage to put up a credible defense against bizarre strongmen when he had only one person 'trusting' him? In episode 24 the next Hero competition is approaching and everybody wants to assassinate X before it takes place—and somehow everybody knows his secret identity now. But X is such an awesome fighter than he hardly needs to take his hands out of his pockets when fighting someone. And he seems to be capable of manipulating time and space, which comes in handy. The animation bounces back and forth between super deformed and super realistic. Perhaps I should have paid more attention to which Hero 'corporation' is which and how they relate to the 'Commission', but it's too late for that now. Hero X gives Ahu a lecture on just what's going on; he mentions that it may be difficult for a dog to grasp everything, but I would say even a human would have trouble. “Unrestrained Trust becomes a catalyst for disaster” is one observation; was that because Zero, the first superhero, went bad? The Commission fears that X will become another Zero, so it is trying to kill him (I assume). X makes the sensational claim that Zero never really perished. “Just as Fear never disappeared, it, alongside Trust, became a power that could trigger a domino effect, sending us into each other's worlds” (Huh?). “I originally thought my own Hero path began with that coin” (he often carries a gold or brass coin). “But in reality, the seeds of cause and effect were planted long ago!” “We are actually all chess pieces manipulated by fate”, X concludes. He vows to “defy fate” by “clocking out on time”, whatever that means (he is a salaryman when not in X mode). And so the series comes to an end (I assume), though it feels like the whole 24 episodes was nothing but a prelude and the real story is just about to get started. The best I could do to make sense of the thing was to choose individual words which seemed to describe it, because entire sentences were out of the question. It was Stylish, Classy, Sophisticated, Extensive, but also Confusing, Frustrating, and ultimately Incomplete. Last updated Monday, October 06 2025. Created Wednesday, April 16 2025. | ||||||||
