Tu Bian Yingxiong X

To Be Hero X stands out as the best anime of the season , a refreshing take on the hero genre. With a bold and intriguing premise, it reimagines the world of heroes through a sharp lens of social critique and unexpected depth.

Its characters are bursting with personality, each adding flavor and humor to an already dynamic narrative. The blend of satire and action keeps the pacing tight, while the worldbuilding teases at larger mysteries yet to unfold.

With the anticipation building around the upcoming hero tournament, there’s genuine excitement to learn more about the Ten Heroes and how their paths will collide.

Although the animation is splendid, I feel like there's something missing on every episode I watch. The pacing also seems odd. There doesn't seem to that excitement to watch the next episode. The story seems somewhat simple, and the characters till now feel very bland. Also I feel the japanese dub doesn't work all that well with the animation speed. The characters move and talk very different to what's being portrayed on the screen, so it all feels very jarring and out of place. Actually, the dubbing feels very similar to some japanese dubs on some of the Hoyoverse games.

I watched the four available episodes in the Japanese dub (the original Chinese audio is surprisingly hard to find), and boy am I confused by the absurdly high rating this has.

Negatives
Characters
- Lin Ling: Lin Ling comes across as your average down-in-the-dumps shounen protagonist with no redeeming qualities. He stumbles into OP mode, with plot arc challenges painting his character as whiny and flat. There is no background provided about his character that drives his ambitions and goals so he feels very shallow and one-dimensional. I'm holding out hope that the story throws some kind of twist at us that morphs his character into something ... interesting, but given we are four episodes in, it really should have been established by now to give watchers a pull into the story. I really like Natuski Hanae as a voice actor, but when he voices this kind of character, boy does it get grating. His overall high-pitched voice gives a great feeling of light innocence which is perfect for roles like 9S in Nier Automata, but in a whiny MC role it adds to the feeling of annoyance I develop towards the character. Unfortunately, Lin Ling is also a huge simp which makes the voice of Natsuki Hanae even more irritating to listen to as he gushes over this random idol figure for seemingly no reason.
- Moon: Aki Toyosaki is great in Persona 5 and Noragami. For some reason, her voice as Moon is grating to the point of annoying. Was this a choice made by the voice direction?? She seems to be nothing more than a plot device, but that's less of a criticism of her specifically and more of the overall writing because none of the characters are particularly compelling, they all feel rather flat.

World-building/plot
The world building is weak and many world-building points are shoe-horned in to drive the plot. Speaking of which, what even is the plot? The driving motivation for the main villain is not clear, which makes it feel like an empty conflict. So is this mean to be episodic? The episodic storytelling angle is weak since the individual character arcs they focus on are so simple and cliched. There are no opportunities for characters to have any interesting or meaningful interactions - like when Lin Ling tries to talk to Stand-man MULTIPLE times to be met with Stand-man literally walking away saying "I have to go for dinner with my friends". This is such a wasted opportunity to see another side of Stand-man through how he interacts with Lin Ling! And to see Lin Ling express his thoughts other than simping for Moon! Watching this series felt like I was watching a cartoon made for children.

Animation
I appreciate the fairly unique animation style and the concept of mixing 2D with 3D, but I can't help but notice that the studio is trying too hard to replicate Fortiche's 3D style. Ignoring the issue of whether or not they did attempt to copy Fortiche and whether or not I think that is OK, I genuinely think they did a good job of making 3D models that look pretty damn good overall. However, when you package the character models with the rest of the animation choices, it's a disaster. The "painterly" style of shading the models looks good when you want to give the scene an emotionally weighty, artistic feel. However, a lot of the animation sequences are exaggerated and have the characters moving and behaving like caricatures. If the character models themselves were exaggerated (in proportion, color, line weight, or deformation), this would create a cohesive and visually interesting animation style. With the more somber, painterly 3D models, you get a result that looks awkward and half-baked, where you expect the characters to move in a beautiful and visually elegant way, but instead they break out in whatever the equivalent of a chicken dance is. It's like if Batman in The Batman started chicken dancing in the grey expanse. Tonally, what they implemented just was not a cohesive choice.

The 2D animation leaves a lot to be desired - the style is so different from the 3D models and so underdeveloped on its own (the animation is stiff and awkward looking, changes from episode to episode in style, and overall of low quality with little thematic relevance to the story or to other 2D animation styles used in the same series).

Positives
Music
Amazing opening song and music. No further comments.

TLDR? Go watch Tiger and bunny instead. They do the "hero as a celebrity" concept waaaaay better, with interesting characters, dialogue, ,and plot arcs.