Certainly, HEROMAN eschews the usual tradition of setting anime in Japan, instead dropping us into the United States and the life of one Joey Jones, the kind of traditional unlikely hero so beloved of comic books and the like. Joey is your average nice but slightly nerdy kid, who is more interested in robots and action heroes than even his cheerleader friend Lina, who clearly things more of him than he realises; not that he can do a lot about it as the unwanted attention of Lina's brother and his friends ensures that he never really gets to see her.
Things take an interest turn for Joey when he comes into the possession of a broken and discarded robot toy, which he loving reassembles only to see a freak accident give it the powers of... well, a giant robot. This happens not a moment too soon, with Lina's life in danger from the fallout of a huge electrical storm which has origins which aren't entirely of this world...
As first episodes go, you probably couldn't get much more predictable than this opener for HEROMAN - Everything from our protagonist and his life situation through to the inevitable love interest and on to the Heroman robot himself (and his name... my God, the name...) feels like the kind of thing you've seen countless times before, usually courtesy of a cheesy American Saturday morning cartoon series. To be fair and in this show's favour, it genuinely feels as though the series is trying to promote and recreate exactly that feel, albeit with a modern and distinctly Japanese twist to make things more interesting. Whether it'll succeed is a tough call at the moment, but with its equally clichéd aliens on the way I don't hold out much hope for HEROMAN to be anything other than a mildly enjoyable, inoffensive and predictable yarn which ends with Joey saving the world and getting the girl after being put through some tough trials and tribulations along the way. Only time will tell, but I doubt that this series will find itself mentioned in the same breath as Spiderman any time soon.
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Anon