The Spring 2025 Anime Preview Guide

To Be Hero X

In this world, people's trust in individuals, quantified as data on their wrists, directly influences their abilities, allowing ordinary people to become superheroes. The hero with the most trust is referred to as X.

To Be Hero X is an original anime project by bilibili and Aniplex. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

I'm having trouble making heads or tails of To Be Hero X. The third in a series of not-really-connected Chinese/Japanese coproductions (the other two are To Be Hero and To Be Heroine), this first episode indulges in no less than three distinct styles of animation and jarring tonal shifts – and they aren't always related to each other. The differing animation styles indicate perspective: there's a base style, flashbacks for the protagonist, and flashbacks for the villain. The plot further muddies the waters by jumping from feeling to feeling, throwing characters in our faces and trusting that we'll understand what to make of them, a narrative choice that I'd normally applaud, but here feels utterly overwhelming. It's not GoHands-levels of off-putting, but it is a lot to take in.

The main takeaway we're meant to have is that the world operates based on two opposite energies: Trust and Fear. Trust is what transforms ordinary people into superheroes. When PR employee Lin Ling witnesses the suicide of hero Nice, Nice's manager, Miss J, spins the story so that Lin Ling is the one who died, using the power of Trust to transform the ordinary young man into Nice 2.0. The longer people see Lin Ling as Nice and the more they believe he's the real Nice, the more he becomes Nice, right down to his eyes and hair changing color. Meanwhile, Lin Ling's former boss, fired in the wake of Nice's suicide, harnesses the power of Fear to become a supervillain: his anger, combined with his apparent love of firing people, allows him to gain malicious powers.

How these opposing energies will be used remains up in the air, especially after the twist at the end of the episode. Lin Ling/Nice seems to be set up to experience what Fear will do when it interacts with Trust within a single person. Since Lin Ling's grasp on being Nice is tenuous due to his personality and anxiety, this has the potential to become a fascinating examination of superpowers and the public perception of heroes and villains. I think that's what it wants to be, although without having seen a second episode, it's hard to say.

More than most shows, I think To Be Hero X will be a show where viewers' mileage will vary. While I appreciate the mixing of styles (and even though I don't love the one for present reality, it does have some exquisite balletic moments), I also found it very overwhelming. If that's not the case for you, I think this will be worth at least two episodes, and even if it's a bit much, this is probably still worth that. At the very least, it's trying hard, and I can respect that.

This anime presents a world full of superheroes with a novel twist. The heroes' powers do not exist in a vacuum. Rather, they are powered by belief—the belief that common people have in each specific hero. This has, of course, made for a world where heroes are celebrities, and the top heroes are, by their very nature, the most charismatic ones.

The second interesting thing about these powers is that they are connected to an identity rather than a person. So, when the average guy, Lin Ling, is publicly perceived as the superhero Nice, he begins to gain Nice's powers. But more than that, he starts to look more and more like Nice until even his eye color changes to match that of the recently deceased hero.

All this is used as the setup to show that, truly, anyone can be a hero. And in the end, it's not the belief of others but his own belief in himself that gives him the power to beat the villain of the week—his old boss.

Of course, in the background of this uplifting self-contained story, a lot of dark stuff is going on. After all, the previous Nice killed himself (and might not have even been the “original” Nice, for all we know). Those around Nice were far more concerned with keeping the money flowing rather than even thinking about why Nice died. And if the final scene of the episode is any clue, Nice might not be the only hero who's been replaced recently—and depending on how long that body's been there, we may know the reason for the previous Nice's suicide after all.

All in all, this is a surprisingly strong premiere, both narratively and thematically. It also has some fantastic art design that meshes several different animation styles to make a show that looks and feels like nothing else out there. I'm shocked by how much I enjoyed this one, and I can't wait to see more next week.

The first and most striking thing anyone will notice about To Be Hero X is its incredible visual flair. How it mixes mediums and blends different 2D and 3D animation styles is gorgeous to look at on a purely aesthetic level. I could see myself keeping up with the show just to see what kind of brilliant sequences its animators manage to cram into each episode. It also has a fun (if somewhat familiar) premise rooted in the dangerous consequences of mixing superheroics into the corporatocratic nightmare world of infinite marketing feedback loops, where the people's “Trust” in its heroes can be literally quantified and measured in the race to become the number one hero of them all. It's fun stuff.

When I first saw the trailers for To Be Hero X, though, I found myself thinking that this could easily be one of those products that is so determined to overload your senses with its creative production choices that the story ends up as gobbledygook. While the end result isn't quite as incomprehensible as I feared it might be, the story of To Be Hero X is clearly not its primary focus. Watching the show honestly reminds me of the fun-but-too-frantic cutscenes from Zenless Zone Zero, which pack a whole lot of fun and charm into each clip, though they are frankly exhausting to watch after more than a few minutes. This premiere had the same effect on me, where I couldn't help but be distracted by the fact that it felt like I'd accidentally pressed the “1.5 speed” button on the player and couldn't turn it off.

We go from meeting our main character and learning that he is a hapless nobody, to watching him forced to help coverup the apparent suicide of beloved hero “Nice” to seeing him forced into a PR showcase with the idol-hero he adores, and finally to discovering that she has also apparently died a horrible and bloody death in his/Nice's own bed. This is all in the span of what feels like maybe only ten minutes, even if the runtime on the video player would attest to the contrary.

None of this means that the story and characters of To Be Hero X won't end up being perfectly fun and compelling by the time the season hits its stride, but it is a shame that the show's script doesn't kick the door down with the same confident swagger of its visuals. This is a hell of an anime to behold, for sure, but time will tell if it ends up making a lasting impression beyond that.