Helck – Episode 1

Umm… it’s just a Gag manga?

The first episode of Helck has aired. This is one of the shows I plan to watch over the Summer, so I’ll be providing my usual Recap and Review along with changes and expansions from the source materials. Look forward to it.

That said, let’s get to it.

Recap

The first episode opens with buff boy Helck standing in an arena as the dust billows, a demon opposite of him. He sends him flying in a single blow with a flashback of what looked to be some dark events happening in his past as he continues to fight. Then a woman notes she senses an endless potential in him, despite being a Human Hero.

Cue the opening credits.

We then go back to a past scene where they note that a Demon Lord was felled by a Hero and the Humans took his castle, happy to have done so since they no longer needed to fear the Demons. But three months later in the Demon Realm, the tournament to find the replacement for said Demon Lord is underway and overseen by Vermilio in place of another demon known as Azudra. The assistant manager gives her the scope of the tournament and how all candidates are bound by a contract.

Upon seeing Helck, she naturally gets a bit upset since he’s a Human and a Hero. The assistant manager thinks it’s okay since he hates Humans and wants to annihilate them, but she thinks it’s an act. However, because he’s bound by the contract he can’t hurt others and others can’t hurt him until the tournament is over.

She thinks that he’s looking to kill the potential candidates for the Demon Lord, but he’s so friendly that it doesn’t seem to be the case. Still, unable to accept that he’s a candidate and there is no one stronger than him due to his power level being 99, she schemes to try to cheat with the assistant manager to get him to fail. At the same time, one of her subordinates was sent to investigate a Human village to gather info only to find all the Humans are gone.

The contest is to make a tower of cards, which no one seemed bothered by despite it being boring. It seems like Helck is struggling, much to her delight given she gave him slippery cards, though Helck unleashes a thunderclap that scatters everyone else’s cards and then builds the tallest tower. It’s technically not cheating since it wasn’t in the rules, but the others interpret the rules as building a demon castle and so you were supposed to protect your own while attacking the others. It isn’t but everyone else thinks it is, so they start blasting each other’s cards.

Vermilio blows her top (again) as her other subordinate gets into contact with her twin sister who was investigating the village. The two have long-ranged telepathy as a Second-Class Special Ability that can be activated by drinking coffee, so they can fill one another in as Helck continues to dominate the tournament. Vermilio even tries to judge one contest under disguise, but it was a cooking contest and the food was so good she couldn’t even bring herself to fail him by a single point.

So Helck is set to go to the Semifinals, having taken out all the other high-level candidates who were expected to make it to the Preliminaries. She looks like she’s going to blow her top, but calms down. Then she takes some time to try to think when she receives information on Helck gathered by her subordinates while he shares a guy moment with another demon called Kenros.

It turns out Helck has a huge bounty on his head for committing the worst crime in human history: killing his younger brother. Said brother was the one who killed the Demon Lord, Cless. It seems that both were born as Heroes at the same time, which is rare enough to begin with.

Adding to that there are no Humans to be found within three massive cities. All of them seemed to have vanished suddenly, a mystery even they aren’t certain about as another Demon Lord’s castle ends up falling under attack. The culprit turns out not to be another Hero, but Winged Soldiers who fell upon the castle with such vigor that the only reason the casualties were kept at a minimum was because that Demon Lord chose to sacrifice himself.

The Demons question if the Humans managed to work out how their regime works, but the bigger issue is that they were able to make it to that castle. If they manage to go any further they’d be able to fall upon them, so Vermilio gives the order for them to strengthen the barrier and prepare for battle.

Review

Wow, this first episode went a lot harder than I expected. I thought we’d get at least two episodes of the gag manga joke, but they outright hinted the story was going to be much deeper with the opening flashbacks and the OP and ED which are better than they have any right to be.

Anyway, the first episode of Helck started strong by introducing our titular character who is a Human and a Hero, in a contest to become the next Demon Lord. Most of the Demons are chill with this since he seems to hate Humans and is an all-around good guy. Unfortunately, Vermilio isn’t one of those and thus she has decided to try to remove him from the tournament.

And she fails every single time, which is where most of the comedy comes from. Helck is seemingly skilled at everything, to the point where nothing she schemes will work. She couldn’t even fail him when she was primed to do so because his dessert was that good.

Now, it seems like she’s being petty and constantly blowing her top. But they make it clear that her reasons come from a place of wanting to protect her people. Humans and Demons clearly aren’t on good terms with one another, especially given that the tournament is meant to replace a Demon Lord that got killed by a Human. She’s not a bad person, she just doesn’t like or trust Humans since they’ve clearly got beef.

The thing is, Helck largely seems to be a good person and the Demons themselves seem to love him. This brings to question one of the three mysteries that were introduced at the end of the episode: why did he kill his brother, who was a fellow Hero and he seems to have been fond of based on keeping the photo?

The second mystery is: what happened to all the Humans? From what we were told, three months ago they were celebrating that the Demon Lord (one of them anyway) had been taken out. Yet now all the cities are depopulated and there are no signs it was a violent act. Where’d they all go?

And last is the mystery of the Winged Soldiers that fell upon the second castle. As they note, Humans shouldn’t be strong enough to take that castle. Yet their assailants weren’t Humans, but Winged Soldiers that have never been seen before and are much stronger than them.

These are likely going to be what the first arc is going to cover, which is something I’m looking forward to if the quality remains on point.

Changes

So, changes from the source materials aren’t really a thing since they only skipped a bit of information dumping that would probably get brought up later I’ll list it anyway, but this covers Chapters 1 – 3 of the Manga.

• The Demon Realm/World consists of 15 nations total, all ruled by a single Demon Emperor. The Four Heavenly Kings help to govern the land and uphold public order. The Empire has been prospering for thousands of years thanks to them.
• Humans, in contrast, are a much younger race with a shorter history and are seen as typically being very weak with small land and armies alike. However, Heroes are occasionally born who are the exception to the rule with Cless having managed to kill the Demon Lord in the castle between them and the Human Realm, making it the first time in 225 Years. 
• The Demons could probably eradicate them if they could send their forces to do so, but there’s another force present to the North that requires the majority of their troops and they can’t spare the manpower.