Helck

Three months have passed since the Demon King was defeated by a hero. Mankind rejoices over their victory, but dwellers of the demon world do not share the same sentiment. With the loss of their king, they must now hold a tournament to decide who will become his successor.

Monitoring the competition is the hot-headed yet powerful Vamirio—one of the Four Heavenly Kings. Among all the participants, she is extremely distrustful of one: Helck, a human hero who claims to hate humanity. As much as she wants to get rid of him, it is impossible due to Helck's incredible strength and popularity.

Amidst the competition, Vamirio discovers that humans have vanished from various towns. As a result of this puzzling turn of events, Vamirio grows desperate to reveal Helck's true intentions by carefully crafting a plan to make Helck lose. If she proves to be successful, she might uncover where his loyalty truly lies before the demon world is endangered.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Vermilio Main

Komatsu, Mikako Japanese

Helck Main

Konishi, Katsuyuki Japanese

Piwi Main

Izawa, Shiori Japanese

Azudora Supporting

Matsuoka, Yoshitsugu Japanese

Alicia Supporting

Kondou, Reina Japanese

Hyura Supporting

Maeda, Rena Japanese

Asta Supporting

Aoki, Shiki Japanese

Isuta Supporting

Shiraishi, Haruka Japanese

Rococo Supporting

Tokui, Sora Japanese

Cless Supporting

Ono, Motoharu Japanese

Cao, Cong Producer

Imai, Ransen Producer

Shikama, Taisuke Producer

Takano, Kenichi Producer

Reviews

Dec 24, 2023

gigikomo

Recommended

Although there are hints of a potentially serious story at the beginning, I almost disregarded 'Helck' as a pointless comedy because let's be real, many anime waste their potential, such as Spy x Family who could be so much better just by ACTUALLY EXPLORING ITS PREMISE and having the characters work together. Disregarding 'Helck' would have been a big mistake! A mistake a lot of people apparently made, but I'm glad I stuck with it - very much so - because the story does get real!

First, let's get the concise stuff out of the way.

Art: 6/10, fine. Not much wrong with it, if any. Subjectively, ... I disliked the design of quite a few side characters. Fortunately, I like the design of the main ones.

Sound: 10/10 both good and immersive, which is a rarity these days, when we have things like season 4 of 'Attack on Titan' with its hip hop tracks. Here, we're in a fantasy and we have traditional, fitting songs played on chronologically fitting instruments! Fantastic!
The voice actress of Vermilio quickly became one of my 6 favorites of all time.

Characters: 10/10 our crew is lovely, funny, and Helck has some badass moments! As for the enemies, they are mysterious and diverse in personalities! I can think of one even being non-Manichaean so far.

Story: 9/10 it's an anime where it's right to give it credit at the start. The development isn't immediately in your face, at first it's subtle in parts and it's not known for a fact that the story will be developed, but I'm here to assure you it is. And it's a touching story at that. There are two reasons I'm not giving the maximum rating: the first is that the conclusion wasn't climactic enough and I don't know if things will be wrapped up well enough for a perfect rating. The second reason is so far, some stories are even better written, and giving 'Helck' the same rating would be unfair to those superior ones, like 'Death Note', 'Steins;Gate' or 'Full Metal Alchemist'. I'm not one of those people who thinks "I liked it, therefore 10/10", no, the full scale exists for a reason and that matters in my opinion, so, 9/10 and that's a very good rating.

Enjoyment: 10/10 I came for the comedy, it was good but I feared it would get stale, old. Fortunately, the comedy did not overstay its welcome and right before getting old (at least for me), the comedy decided to step back and let the story shine! And at that point, I stayed for the story and boy, was it fully worth it! Although the story has not been completed in season 1, it's the start of a potential masterpiece so far. The stopping point wasn't too shabby either!

Overall: 9/10 so far, I really hope the anime gets completed at some point and that season 2 lives up to my expectations. It'll be harder because concluding a story nicely and climactically is hard. My 9/10 rating only concerns season 1 so far, but for a start, it's worth that rating to me so that's what I give.

Reviewer’s Rating: 10

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Feb 27, 2024

Ellenya

Mixed Feelings

I'm making this review mainly to tell you that the anime doesn't finish the plot, it ends in a cliffhanger. I don't think it's worth it to watch the 24 episodes while there's not a continuation out there to watch.
All in all, Helck has a vibe similar to the old 2000's animes, which is really refreshing. You can see that in the art style and also in the type of comedy that is scattered here and there and softens the plot, which is actually surprisingly dark.
Art style: amazing.
Animation: really good, well-balanced fighting scenes.
Plot: the main plot is surprisingly good, but it doesn't finish, and it's ... interrupted countless times by side quests that make the pacing of the anime kinda boring. Basically if you survive all the fillers you will still be disappointed because the anime doesn't finish the main plot and there will be a lot of unanswered questions.
Characters: Helck himself doesn't have a lot of character development, it's more like "you get to know who he is throughout the anime", while Vermillion/Anne has quite a lot of development as she changes her views on life due to her experiences with Helck. This is definitely a strong point of the anime.
Overall: Mixed feelings because it feel pointless to watch an anime without an actual end, but if they launch a season 2 then it should be worth it to watch the whole thing.

Reviewer’s Rating: 6

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Dec 19, 2023

AnimeEnjoyer420

Not Recommended

Sometimes when you have a complete dud of a series, it can be hard to know where things went wrong. Not so in the case of Helck, where there is one simple, glaringly obvious problem lit up in neon lights that makes the rest of it unsalvageable. Namely, it looks ugly as sin.

Modern Satelight is depressing for many reasons, but this effort on Helck has to stand as one of the studio's lowlights in its 20 some years of production. The character designs are poor, the animation is stiff in the best of times, but rarely deviates from its baseline level of "hideous". The action ... storyboarding is among the worst in recent memory, leading to a few fight scenes that had me outright laughing at how something this incompetent could make it to air. It suffers from many of the same problems that afflicted the similarly-mocked Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer last year, namely that the slavish devotion to 1-to-1 remakes of the manga panels for a beloved series, combined with next to no resources or time for production, resulted in a series with extremely low ambitions that nonetheless utterly failed to meet them. Whatever underlying charms there are to the original are totally lost in this adaptation, a failure so comprehensive that it's almost inconceivable that it could lead to someone who was not previously a fan of the series picking up the manga.

And to be clear, that is not the only failure here. There is a specific vibe to watching a feature film that was poorly adapted from a short film, where you can tell exactly when the original premise ran out of gas and the writer had to start throwing new ideas at the wall to fill out the runtime, even if they don't fit in with the original story. That's the vibe I got from the story here, which begins as a one-note gag comedy (Helck's really strong! He keeps easily winning the competitions to become the next demon lord even though he's human!) and eventually unspools into a tragic drama over the course of an agonizingly long flashback that lasts for almost the entire 2nd cours. These parts don't fit nicely together at all. The tone shift comes out of nowhere and it's almost absurd to look back at the early episodes of the series and see where it began before the "digression" that ends up being the main plot of the series after the gag comedy is discarded. While it's tempting to discredit the anime production for this considering how badly they dropped the ball in every other area, this is a panel-by-panel recreation of the manga's story so it seems to be an inherent problem with the story (or at least inherent to adapting it into a TV anime) and I'm not sure even a stronger hand at the till could have smoothed over that flaw.

At the end of the day, what you have here is a lackluster and poorly paced story given over to a seemingly-indifferent and resource-starved production team, making it less than the sum of its parts. While I have to assume there are positive things about the source material considering how many people like it, none of its positive qualities come through in this woeful adaptation.

Reviewer’s Rating: 1

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	Poll: Helck Episode 24 Discussion ( 1 2 3 ) Stark700 - Dec 19, 2023	104 replies	by XArceusX »» Yesterday, 3:04 AM
	Poll: Helck Episode 23 Discussion Stark700 - Dec 12, 2023	48 replies	by XArceusX »» Yesterday, 2:37 AM
	Poll: Helck Episode 22 Discussion ( 1 2 ) Stark700 - Dec 5, 2023	65 replies	by XArceusX »» Yesterday, 1:07 AM
	Poll: Helck Episode 21 Discussion Stark700 - Nov 28, 2023	42 replies	by XArceusX »» Yesterday, 12:43 AM
	Poll: Helck Episode 20 Discussion Stark700 - Nov 21, 2023	45 replies	by XArceusX »» Mar 14, 11:05 PM