This review contains spoilers, as I find myself unable to explain what I dislike about this manga without diving into spoilers. You have been warned.

Now, to go on a tangent before starting the actual review:

Something that has always bothered me about the seinen demographic and its fans is that it takes very little to appeal and make said fans assume something is amazing strictly by virtue of having adult characters. This takes on many forms; for example, seinen fans can assume that a show with complex themes is instantly fantastic because of those themes, while ignoring the fact it has no real hook to make the audience care or be interested in the main characters.

What is a noteworthy trend is that many seinen praised as some of the greatest anime and manga ever often have uninteresting, dull and apathetic main characters who never genuinely grow out of that role. And mind you, I can understand the apathy that'd come with working day in and day out for years on end and all the disillusionment from that kicking in and replacing any hope someone had when younger, but the problem comes when even that is filled in a false sense of the manga being just gorier than what it would've been as a shonen. After all, maturity does not magically change if you swap age demographics.

Where am I going with this? I am a Hero is guilty of everything I just said, even well before its infamously poor ending that negates whatever themes it was attempting to go for previously.

The story is a seemingly straightforward zombie apocalypse where things have gone straight to hell, and everything that everyone knows is collapsing completely. The manga does an alright job (but doesn't linger, which your mileage may vary on) showing the main character reacting in complete shock to the trauma of losing virtually everyone he knows. The atmosphere is excellently presented, and there's always a curious feeling of wanting to know what'll happen next, and for once in such a manga the fact the main character is competent at fighting off zombies is justified by him actually knowing how to use a rifle properly, as opposed to most thrillers of this type wherein the main character simply whips that out of nowhere and adapts to it in minutes.

Where the story falls flat is in its themes and presentation. In the former case, it's unclear what exactly kind of point there is to the story at all; in most zombie-related stories, there's often a message that even though humanity has died off, people will nonetheless try to live past everything and prevail. While traces of that do exist here (represented by the various resistance groups that pop up throughout the plot), this quickly gets thrown aside in favor of a discussion about collectivism represented by the zombies creating a literal hivemind, and individualism as represented by humanity.

The problems with such a conflict are readily apparent; across the course of the manga, human beings have bonded together to fight zombies. More importantly, there's very little foreshadowing towards this beyond zombies being able to communicate with each other earlier. Speaking of humanity, this brings us to another problem about the plot; humanity, outside of the three main characters, are hilariously incompetent to the point where it breaks immersion completely.

The aforementioned resistance groups have various problems that lead to them either disintegrating or becoming ineffective; while the manga deserves credit for attempting to show how radically morals would change in such a setting, it also fails to take into consideration the fact that human beings don't interact with danger the same way and often, people who face crises would become more clingy even to complete strangers because they don't want to lose more.

This is clearly shown in the lack of camaraderie and friendship in the other resistance groups outside of the main leads in the story, who are borderline unlikable, extremely unrealistic and come off as plot devices that our main characters visit and proceed to move past. One particularly grating example is a group of internet trolls that form a resistance group onto themselves, and despite having fairly strict rules in order to figure out who is and isn't a zombie by suspicion, for some reason fail to notice obvious symptoms and coincidently fall prey to that plot convenience so that the group would collapse and their psychotic leader would proceed to become an antagonist in the series.

More importantly, the various subplots in the plot never really stop being introduced, even a dozen chapters towards the finale. This makes the plot disjointed, chaotic and unfocused in how it juggles all these subplots, and I'd be lying if I didn't say that in the last third of the manga I legitimately lost whatever coherency the plot had altogether.

This brings us to the other major problem that plagues this manga; the characters. If you can call them that, the characters are one note and almost strictly defined by how they react to events in the story, with extremely basic personality traits, virtually no quirks to speak of beyond the main character's excitement that the world is crashing and burning around him and how he wants to be a hero, and plagued by the extremely questionable presentation of certain aspects involving the manga in general.

The main trio are largely defined by their relationship to the main character and have very little agency of their own; they stand out as fairly unlikable people who hardly have any likable personality traits, and whatever bonding occurs between them feels as though it were written forcibly rather than flows naturally in the dialogue between them. This makes it difficult to empathize or care for them, and the manga does a poor job trying to make you pity them (one for being chewed out at work and being paranoid about being cheated on, one for being bullied and one for being treated like a sexual outlet with a resistance group) by giving them extremely forced backstories. And in the case of the main character himself, it only makes him more difficult to sympathize with due to his mistrust of his wife and monologues making it hard to pity or like the kind of malicious person he is, even before any of this started occurring.

Outside of the main trio, the side characters don't receive development worth mentioning beyond being cannon fodder for zombies; some turn to zombies, others kill themselves, others yet start infighting with other people and all of them are idiots that seems to act in stupid and irrational ways when the plot demands that a resistance group be wiped out. This is often played for irony, and gets tiresome very quickly when the reader catches on to that pattern of a character mentioning something happening, something happening to them involving that subject matters and dying because of it. One time this stood out to me in a particularly forced way was when a female character gets pregnant, and while thinking of her pregnancy ironically gets bitter by a zombified child, which the manga portraying it as some poetic and tragic death.

Beyond the cast, themes and story, the artwork is absolutely gorgeous and is bar none the main reason to ever read this manga. Details are beautifully drawn, gore is splendidly portrayed and the backgrounds are utterly beautiful. Characters are drawn distinctly from one another and expressions are dynamic and interesting to look at, which is a shame because it is wasted on a cast of dull plot devices.

This brings us to my own personal enjoyment. In sharp contrast to the content of this review thus far and despite all my various problems with it, I actually did find some enjoyment in the mindless gore that the manga had to offer, and honestly enjoyed the beginning of the zombie outbreak when everything slid straight to hell. The issue is that there aren't many moments throughout the story proper that ever manage to replicate the same degree of tension as that initial feeling, which is a shame since it means that parts of the manga meander along what feels like filler within the plot, where things that are plot-significant are happening but could've easily been portrayed in a handful of chapters instead of 50, since virtually no character progression is occurring for the overwhelming majority of this manga. The zombies themselves are fairly dull beyond them repeating nitpicks of their day to day lives when alive, and them having some sentient hivemind did not make them any more interesting to me as a reader, as that is a subject that has been done much better elsewhere.

And perhaps a nitpick of mine that may not be for everyone is the emphasis on rather disgusting sex jokes that come off as forced black humor rather than anything a genuinely witty person would come up with. Examples of this are abundant, but two that stick out are early in the manga when a woman who is notorious among the manga magazine the main character works in for getting around gets zombified, and I kid you not, she starts repeating AH AH AH in imitation of the orgasms she had in life. A separate occasion has a zombified man quite literally fapping until he rips his dick out, and while I'm certainly fine with sexual humor and dark humor, it slides into straight up feeling ridiculous and breaking immersion in the story completely in favor of some cheap, immature sex joke.

While I did enjoy this manga enough to read it all the way to the end, I couldn't help but feel like this is a story that could've easily been shorter, more character-driven and focused. I genuinely believe this is not the mature story that a seinen tag'd imply it to be, and neither do I believe that even before its finale was it worth all the high praise due to all the various problems that plague the plot beforehand. The setting deserves points for attempting to portray a more intimate day to day take on humans surviving day to day for food and shelter, but ultimately I cannot call this anything other than abysmal due to its unlikable, uninteresting and underdeveloped main cast. The plot is unfocused and fails to resolve most of its subplots, while the themes are unfocused and unresolved.

Ultimately, my opinion is that this was an utterly abysmal read. And I want to make it clear that this is strictly my opinion alone; I do not begrudge anyone for enjoying or liking this, and most certainly am open for discussion involving this should anyone desire for it.

Thank you very much for reading this review.