"TO BE HERO X" is a chinese anime, and it comes from the director of Link Click (Haoling Li). This guy is pretty much the one spearheading chinese anime's insertion into the broad, western market. His stuff is slick, gripping and extremely high quality (both Link Click and TO BE HERO X are juggernauts in terms of their production. They feel just as good as most of the great japanese animated shows, if not better at times).

I had no prior experience with chinese anime before Link Click, so I don’t have many points of reference when it comes to chinese media as a whole, but I get the feeling that this director in particular is trying to appeal to the rest of the world with the kinds of themes, ideas and values it promotes with these works.

Cultural differences will always impact someone's perception of a work, but I think this guy is an expert at allowing foreign audiences to feel like their experience isn’t being compromised because of a language barrier. Or, a barrier in terms of how we might perceive certain social issues differently.

There is simply no division, at least not a meaningful one, and the shows even have japanese and english dubs to make the transition even easier if you aren't used to chinese dubs.

I mention all this because I imagine that, if you have never watched a chinese anime, then the term by itself might even be a bit of a detractor. It's normal to be kind of reluctant to give a chance to stuff we aren't used to, but I guarantee it’s worth it.
And sadly, it’s a shame to see the current news about tensions rising between China and Japan. Simply because I think it's a shame that the work of people like this director (who is clearly very influenced by both japanese media and western media) might get indirectly hurt by the current political scene. This guy was making breakthroughs, and I hope his art continues to find ways to reach the rest of the world just like it has for the past few years with Link Click.

Going back to TO BE HERO X: this is one of the most quality, animated shows you can watch. Every episode is absolutely insane in pretty much every single aspect, but I think the main strengths of this guy's work are: high production values, insane visuals, stellar music and incredible writing with an emphasis on curiosity and taking the viewer into a journey where they uncover many secrets about that world together with the characters.

It's a story about many people and it’s ultimately a whole first season of world and character building as well as considerable development for them (which is surprising, since we spend like 3 episodes per character, and yet they all feel like fully fleshed out, interesting characters. More so than characters in whole seasons of your standard anime show). It takes its time revealing things slowly and takes you across different moments in time. The story bounces back and forth in a period of some years, as they introduce characters and slowly bring them all together for the end. We have no second season right now, but it’s obviously going to happen at some point.

One of my favorite things about this show is how it manages to keep you engaged through the many characters it presents to you. There's so many I have no doubt people will have a favorite above all the others, and I think this is important because at its core this show is pretty close to being an anthology of sorts. You can watch most arcs out of order and on their own, and you would still have a complete, satisfying experience. Not everything will be resolved, of course, but you get a complete emotional and narrative arc in every single instance.
My point here being: you could realistically pick a character you like and watch their entire arc on its own, and the show/story wouldn't fall apart because of it. This is indicative of this show's writer ability to pull off a disjointed structure in a meaningful and interesting way, something you don't find very often in media as a whole.

There's a character whose entire development happens in the span of a single episode, and yet he ended up being one of my favorites due to how effective it was at conveying the feelings it was trying to get across. I think I could show that single episode to someone and get them hooked, which is probably one of the highest compliments you can offer a show with a structure such as this one.

I like this, because it feels like a big swing at the increasing repetitiveness seen in the structure of most seasonal shows. This is a show that goes against a lot of the established ideas about how to structure a 24 episode season, in a world where most anime shows with 12 and 24 episodes are pretty straightforward in their storytelling. Seeing a show that tries to move through different points in a timeline rather than a linear approach by itself is already fairly rare by today standards, at least in the anime world. But then if you add up stuff like the fact that this show is simultaneously 2D and 3D, then I've got no doubt this is well above your average show. And I say this knowing full well the amount of incredible shows that have been coming out as of late, but this is, in my eyes, something else.

The whole thing oozes creativity, and it's fundamentally an exploration of the idea of the hero. How does a hero come to be? what does it mean to be one? and how would the process of maintaining power and status on a world of social media like ours look like? The show explores questions like these.

I recommend checking out the opening up on youtube if you're still on the fence about whether to watch it or not, since it does a great job at conveying what this show is all about (you catch a glimpse of the world, the vibes, the production values, etc).

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I'll be waiting for that second season, as well as whatever else this guy makes.

DISCLAIMER: The final rating isn’t representative of anything, the only reason why i’m even giving it a rating is because anilist won't allow me to post a review without assigning it a number that ranges from 0 to 100. If it were for me, I would post all of my reviews without ratings as I feel that trying to encapsulate a work of art on a numerical scale is completely nonsensical.