Allen is the son of a duke, but only for about thirty seconds, before he’s promptly disinherited by his blatantly villainous father for being level 1 and receiving no blessing from the gods. Secretly, though, Allen is the reincarnation of a long-dead hero and he’s super OP. He chances upon Princess Lise as she’s in danger and saves her. They seem oddly familiar, and later it’s revealed that they used to be betrothed. We also meet Beatrice, Lise’s guardian knight. They journey on, finding a hero named Akira and helping her defeat a dragon. Allen breaks his sword, so they go visit a top-tier elven blacksmith Lise knows named Noelle. She agrees to make a sword. While waiting, the party meets some mysterious strangers (one of whom is also a cute girl—that makes five so far), but the strangers are secretly nefarious and are plotting with Allen’s nefarious family to do nefarious things. Once the sword is finished, they go out to test it, and run into a fearsome monster that Noelle has some sort of traumatic history with. This is supposed to be a cliffhanger, but we already know how crazy-strong Allen is, so it’s hard to get worried.
There’s nothing here to really hate on, but nothing to commend either. These two episodes felt generic and formulaic. Here’s the reincarnated hero, who is rejected for being weak but who is secretly incredibly OP. Here’s the princess/implied love interest. Here are four other pretty girls who probably also have potential to be harem members eventually. Here’s the hero slaying a dragon. Here’s the bad guys talking cryptically about their evil plans to take REVENGE ON TEH GODS!!!1 There’s no heart, no personality, nothing to set this apart from any number of other anime about arbitrarily powerful heroes.
My only complaint would be that there are some weird story beats that come out of nowhere or aren’t explained. Why can’t Allen level up and why didn’t he get a divine blessing? Why did the story wait until after Allen has saved Lise and they’ve interacted familiarly to surprise us with the reveal that they were betrothed? Why was their engagement broken off? Lise doesn’t seem to know about Allen getting disowned, so that can’t be the reason…? Oh, wait, I can definitely hate on the awful translation choice of referring to Lise as a “saintess.” First, that’s not a real word, per Merriam-Webster. Also, hello, the English word “saint” is a gender-neutral term that doesn’t need a feminine form! That probably grated on me more than anything else. So like I said, this show isn’t completely awful, and I wasn’t miserable while watching, but there isn’t any reason for me to recommend it to you. You could do worse than watch it; you could also do quite a bit better.
The Banished Former Hero Lives as He Pleases is streaming on Crunchyroll.
Wait a minute… isn’t there another show with almost the same name? This is so confusing.
You could be thinking of Banished from the Hero’s Party, I Decided to Live a Quiet Life in the Countryside, which is a much superior series.
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I was thinking of giving this one a go, but then I saw the rating on Crunchyroll. People are pretty generous with their stars so series that are average or better get 4+ stars there, so a rating of 3.4 stars for a series gives me great pause.