The Legendary Hero is Dead!

Episode 11

Taking a story that started as comedy and shifting it into a serious drama or action series is not an easy task. It's not terribly common in manga, but anyone who followed web comics back in the mid-to-late 2000s probably knows at least one series that tried to make that jump, and more than likely fell flat on its face. You need a lot of writing prowess to make that shift because you essentially have to tell two different stories at the same time. It's like trying to disassemble a sailboat to build a yacht while you're in the middle of the Atlantic. Doing it with animation is even more of a task because you need a team – and an abiding production schedule – that can visually convey madcap comedy and sincere action in equal measure and effortlessly shift between the two. If you aren't able to pull it off, you threaten to ruin whatever comedic potential your series has, while simultaneously delivering a rote, boring, or undesired drama.

Such is the case with The Legendary Hero is Dead! trying to take this big final battle seriously. We've established well enough that the production can't handle convincing or exciting fights, and that kneecaps this whole episode from the beginning. The battles here have the production values of slideshows played at 2x speed, and none of the special attacks or magical threats leave a whiff of impact. The big fight between Touka and Diego is so generic that it saps our protagonist of whatever distinct personality he used to have, now standing as a slightly snarky hero facing down the most paper-flat big bad you can imagine. After all of one mildly clever trick, the whole affair devolves into trying to hit the boss monster's big glowing weak spot, with the added drama of Touka harming himself by doping on mana potions. It's the kind of fight you'd see in a filler episode of The Seven Deadly Sins, delivered with animation on par with that show's worst episodes.

Though, what turned this episode from a tired chore to actively insulting is its attempts to add pathos. We open with a lengthy argument about the Necromancers' oppression and revenge and the nature of death, but none of this carries any weight this late in the series. The show has thoroughly failed to convey whatever oppression led the Necromancers to usher in the apocalypse, and introducing Anri's brother this late in the game is a laughably cheap attempt at adding emotional stakes. I especially had to laugh at Anri breathlessly defending Touka's heroic nature by claiming he “never complained” about joining the quest, because he spent the whole first half of the show complaining! You had to blackmail him with his own corpse, multiple times, to keep him from just giving the job to somebody else! I genuinely can't think of a more apt example of how this show has twisted itself into knots for this dramatic turn than the characters actively lying to our faces.

I don't know what else to say. This show's meager ambitions have outpaced its meager-er grasp. It doesn't have the animation or direction to be a compelling battle series. It doesn't have the writing chops to be a traditionally dramatic story. Its origin as a bawdy fanservice comedy leaves its cast unsuitable for the stakes it's trying for now. Yet the dive into sincere danger and action has left its few, feeble attempts at laughs or cheesecake so incongruous they can give you whiplash. The Legendary Hero is Dead! was always an aged and patched-up canoe. Now it's tried to transform into a battleship, only to crumble into driftwood and leave its entire crew adrift, waiting for the sharks below to devour them by next week.

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The Legendary Hero is Dead! is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.