The Spring 2024 Anime Preview Guide

The Banished Former Hero Lives as He Pleases

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Deemed a "good-for-nothing" for his low level and lack of a god-given Gift, Allen is stripped of his noble status and banished from the Duchy of Westfeldt. But Allen has a secret: he was a great hero in a previous life, and he's thrilled for the chance to finally live the way he pleases. His drama-free existence, however, is soon interrupted by a desperate encounter with his ex-fiancée. As a former hero who still possesses the incredible powers from his past life, Allen can't ignore someone in need no matter how much he might like to.

The Banished Former Hero Lives as He Pleases is based on a light novel series written by Shin Kouduki and illustrated by Chocoan. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Mondays.

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James Beckett
Rating:
Friends, I may have to pull a mulligan on this one. I swear to you, I watched every agonizing minute of The Banished Former Hero…'s premiere. I stared with what my wife described as “lunatic intent” at the subtitles, to ensure that I followed along with every trite and meaningless line of dialogue that fell out of the character's poorly drawn and awkwardly animated mouths. I wrote notes characters named “Alan”, “Beátrice”, “Lise” and “Akira”; I jotted down chronicles of their exploits “Fighting the Red Dragon King” and “Visiting the Elven Blacksmith Ladies Who Don't Wear Shirts Under Their Thick Leather Aprons for Some Reason.” I even have this one very odd and specific note that says, “Won't somebody get the poor Lise a good hairbrush and some decent conditioner!?” Another one reads: “Dear god, why does this one elf girl have titty-holes in her shirt that just make it look like somebody stabled asymmetrical lumps of breast flesh onto the outside of her clothes???”

Despite all of my efforts, though, I have to confess that I have somehow come out of the grueling gauntlet of The Banished Former Hero Lives as He Pleases with absolutely no memory of one thing that happened in either of its first two episodes. No line of dialogue or sequence of moving images remains in my mind. Looking at my notes, I found another line that describes animation that “looks like if The Fruit of Evolution decided that it wanted to be taken seriously, but somehow managed to look even more embarrassing!” Next to the note is a little doodle of me as a cartoon stickman dousing my eyes with a bottle labeled ‘BLEACH’. How could it be that I cannot recall even a single frame of this apparent garbage fire?

Maybe my mind is protecting me from a deeply traumatic viewing experience. Or, perhaps, The Banished Former Hero Lives as He Pleases is a show that is so utterly contemptible in its lack of ambition or artistic merit that my conscious mind is incapable of putting the disparate pieces of its terribleness together into a comprehensible gestalt? Who is to say? All I can tell you is that the last note in my book is just a giant, jagged “1”, so I can only assume that this is the score that my unblemished self from an hour ago would want me to give this episode.

(Upon reflection, I'm pretty sure that I've already used this exact bit for a Preview Guide entry on some other generic isekai mush that came out recently, but you know what? If The Banished Former Hero Lives as He Pleases isn't going even to pretend like it gives a crap about ripping off the rip-offs that were themselves already rip-offs of other stories, then I'm not going to feel bad about ripping off Past James! We're all getting served reheated leftovers tonight!)

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Richard Eisenbeis
Rating:

Let's start with the elephant in the room. This show looks terrible animation-wise. It's under-detailed to an extreme and, at times, character movement looks like something out of flash animation (when it's not just an indistinct blur). Everything about this anime visually screams that there wasn't enough money to go around.

However, that said, the cinematography, at the very least, makes me feel like the production crew was trying. They still show the action—even when it would have no doubt been easier and more efficient to simply cut away or show a simpler-to-animate shot. So even though the result was… “not good,” I still respect the people behind this one for not compromising on their vision.

As for the episode's main theme, it's an above-average look into the nature of heroes. Allen was a “destined hero,” a person who saved the world time and again—only to be feared and hated for his power. In his second life, he wants to live a normal life of peaceful obscurity.

However, the point of this episode is to show us that it wasn't destiny that made Allen a hero, it was him as a person. Even without destiny, the heart of a hero is still within him. He can't stand by and do nothing when others are in mortal danger—especially not for his selfish want of a normal life. It makes him a likable enough lead—even if his supporting cast (read: “harem”) are cardboard cutouts at this point.

So, will I continue watching? Almost certainly not. But I that doesn't mean I regret the 22 minutes I spent watching this one either.

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Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

Allow me to thank whoever made the decision to give Noelle shorts. (And the subtitler who decided to spell her name properly; the novels and manga's English editions both spell it “Noel,” which is the masculine. Yes, I am picky.) Pants would have been better, but at least she's no longer smithing while wearing a poofy mini skirt. I approve.

Mind you, that's about the only thing I can find to approve of here. While neither the novels nor the manga are particularly great (at least, not as far as I've read, which is the first volume of each), both do at least a marginally better job of telling the story. Part of that is down to not being saddled with subpar art and animation, but their pacing is also simply better. For comparison, the two episodes Crunchyroll inexplicably decided to drop at once cover basically the entirety of the first light novel, which obviously necessitated leaving things out. While I'm pleased they didn't take the manga route to plot excision and leave out Alan's horrible brother and father plotting, the story is pretty severely truncated. We know little about Lise or Béatrice or their relationship to Alan, and Akira's entire arc is ruthlessly stripped down to its bare essentials, including the fact that the dragon dismembered the little girl in order to torment Akira. While I'm not a fan of gratuitous violence, I feel that was important for Akira's motivation in terms of agreeing to take the girl with her and her overall heroic drive. But oh well, who needs motivation when the series appears to just be going through the motions anyway?

That's the main problem here: everything is just going through the motions. The villains are bad because they say so, Lise and Alan have a relationship because they do, and there's some reincarnation stuff because. Because what? Who cares! If it gives Alan awesome powers despite being level one, that's good enough for this show. There is some effort made to provide backstory in Noelle's tragic past and Alan's prior life, but like everything else, it's rushed through in order to keep trucking through the story at breakneck speeds. If you must experience this franchise, I suggest picking up the light novels, because at least those make a token effort to make plot points matter.

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Nicholas Dupree
Rating:

I was going to dock this show points for being an unnecessary double-episode premiere, but then something magical happened. In the middle of episode two, the renowned blacksmith revealed our hero's special new sword, a legendary work that she promised would surpass the treasured divine blades of old. And it was the most embarrassing thing I'd ever seen. Of the hundreds-to-thousands of cool magic swords I've seen anime characters pull out, this one was the saddest, goofiest piece of animated metal I can remember. I laughed out loud at it and said “oh noooo~” like I was watching a kid fall down during an elementary school christmas pageant. It was so pitiful that it pepped me up during what was otherwise a dirt-flavored show about nothing of interest.

“Pitiful” is really the word for this whole premiere. It's one of those shows that was obviously tossed together as quickly and thoughtlessly as possible, evidenced by the consistently awful, lifeless animation and art. Even the OP is just reused footage cobbled together from the previous episode, with some filters thrown on to make it less obvious. Characters move and emote with the grace of a rumpled plastic bag in a street gutter occasionally catching the wind. Action scenes are at best stills, at worst incomprehensible nightmares of editing to disguise how little has actually been drawn for any given action beat. It's almost begging to be put out of its misery. Or my misery. Maybe both.

Doesn't help that there's not a single original idea or character in this whole thing. Alan, our former and current hero, says he wants to use his new life doing as he wants and not worrying about the responsibilities that wrecked his previous life, yet he sure is doing a lot of heroic deeds all the time. Saving princesses, slaying dragons, getting magical blacksmiths to craft legendary swords. It's almost like the whole reincarnation gimmick is just a way to justify Alan being monumentally stronger than anyone else, yet still looked down upon by the villains. Meanwhile his companions are entirely bereft of personality, existing as vaguely feminine sources of conflict for Alan to rescue or resolve. And of course, his evil family who thought he was a failure and disowned him are secretly the bad guys behind all the bad things happening in the kingdom, and their banishing Alan for his failures will doubtlessly prove their demise.

It's the most boring power fantasy this side of the ostracized nerd revenge fantasies in stuff like Arifureta. The story wants to indulge in the underdog story by proving the doubters wrong, without ever having to work or worry that victory isn't assured in every encounter. Put that together with the dog-water production, and you have a recipe for a show so bad it just makes you sad to look at it.