The Spring 2020 Manga Guide

The Hero is Overpowered but Overly Cautious

What's It About? 

The Gods are real, and they want nothing more than to protect the universe from evil. Ristarte is younger member of the pantheon, looking to carve out a name and help people. She has been tasked with saving a world—although it will be difficult. This world is Ranked S, meaning it is menaced by demons of incredible power. Thankfully, she seems to have found the perfect Hero to beat back the darkness: a man from Japan whose high stat numbers indicate incredible power.

And so, she summons the man, named Seiya Ryūgūin, and sets off to save the world. There's only one problem. Despite his incredible power, Seiya is overly cautious. He spends more time working out to prepare than fighting monsters. It looks like, in order to save the world, Ristarte is going to have to spend time dealing with the flightiness and anxiety of her Hero than fighting the demons.

The Hero is Overpowered but Overly Cautious is based on the light novel series by Light Tuchihi. This manga adaptation features art by Koyuki and character designs by Saori Toyota. It is published by Yen Press, retailing for $13.00 physically and $6.99 digitally. The light novels are also available from Yen Press. An anime adaptation recently finished airing and is currently streaming on Funimation.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Faye Hopper

Rating:

The Hero is Overpowered but Overly Cautious is hinged on a solid joke, but through light novel clichés and a general mean-spirited air, it squanders most of its prospective humor. Despite a few chuckles, the book is often unpleasant and unmemorable.

What sinks the manga is how cruel the Hero is. He is constantly snipping at the Goddess who summoned him, calling her names and putting down her abilities, and spends most of his time flexing in his room while the world burns. It would be one thing if the Hero's difficulty in answering the call to adventure were based on his anxiety or a potential inferiority complex; I could see it being extremely funny if the Hero were completely unaware of his abilities and yet still obliterated enemies, or even relatable if he were constantly putting himself down even after he saves the village from demons. But the Hero's ‘caution’ feels less like wariness and more like ego-tripping. He knows exactly how powerful he is (he's smart and capable enough to know how to mask his stats after only a single training session), he just wants absolute, total victory. Even if there are token moments where he says his over preparation is his way of helping people, his coldness and lack of effort in fighting evil stands as a counter to any kind of altruism. It doesn't help that book is constantly showing people dying and suffering as a result of his inaction, which makes him even more unlikeable.

The Hero is Overpowered's broader narrative is also not all that engaging. The focus is largely on stats charts and power levels in a way that feels totally counter to farce. The reasons why the demons are attacking is never revealed, and it makes it hard to care. Its divine twist on the traditional isekai is a welcome novelty but is mostly sidelined. Apart from one chapter where the Hero drives a Warrior God into fear and submission while training due to his sheer raw power, the fact that the manga is hinged around the actions of Gods and Goddesses barely factors in. Like the humorous idea at its center, the unique fantasy twists are underrealized.

I am continually puzzled by these isekai light novels that have a very solid comedic hook and spend almost no time on making jokes. It's like you've struck gold and instead of smelting it into nice jewelry, you just leave the uncleaned, yet-to-be-carved-out ore on your mantel as a testament to your achievement. A solid idea can only get you so far, after all. You need to execute it to its full potential. If you want a version of this that actually bothers to harness a good premise, I think you'd be better served reading One-Punch Man, because The Hero is Overpowered is almost as disappointing as summoning a hero to save the world only to find that they'd rather do push-ups than help people.

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Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

It's always a nice discovery when a novel's adaptation is as good (or nearly as good) as its source material, and that's the case with The Hero is Overpowered but Overly Cautious. In some ways, this volume is actually a little more fun than the original book – Rista's over-the-top reactions work better in picture form and make her substantially less annoying in places, while actually seeing Seiya's bored, expressionless face can, in some scenes, work better than written descriptions of the same. The manga nicely blends these moments with a solid retelling of the actual story, which means that people who prefer to read manga to light novels can still get the flavor of Light Taguchi's work.

This format does, of course, have its drawbacks. Mainly that's the fact that the reaction shots and other similar artistic features at times overshadow the drier humor that graces the text at times, like Rista's decision to summon a Japanese hero because isekai literature has made them easier to deal with in summoning situations or the way Seiya's tactics basically amount to grinding endlessly in an MMORPG before ever taking on a quest or joining a party. Those are still present in the manga, they just don't stand out as much with the “louder” humor naturally being better suited to the format. While it's not quite a blink and you'll miss it situation, it does mean that if you're not a close reader you can lose some of these aspects of the story.

I can't say that that would make the book any less amusing or make less sense, though, because the story's central joke is right there in the title: Seiya is very overpowered (which is why Rista chooses him in the first place) and takes “overly cautious” to brand new heights. Given that Rista has summoned him to save a world from imminent destruction by a demon lord (and that we know that at least one world didn't get saved in time), that's a problem, because while he's farting around with weights and crunches, Rista is all too aware that time could be running out for Gaeabrande, and if she screws up her first S-ranked world mission, she could be in some serious trouble herself. We could make the argument that Seiya's training makes him so powerful that the time he spends at it won't matter in the end because he'll be able to vanquish the evil that much more expediently, but that comes with a pretty big caveat: what if he gets so powerful that he takes out Gaeabrande while he's getting rid of the bad guy? Things sure didn't look good for that starter town he burned…

Even though I usually suggest going to the original source, this manga version really does the job well enough that it offers a similar reading experience. If you liked the anime or just think the story sounds like fun, this is a good way to check it out.