Stand My Heroes is the anime adaptation of a Japanese otome puzzle mobile game that is known to be romance and mystery genre but is more focused on the mystery than the romance. The story starts with Detective Rei Izumi who did not obey the orders and caused a damage due to which she went on an administrative leave. A special division called STAND hires her as they notice her capabilities. What is STAND? With the objective of destroying Oomori Pharmaceutical Corporation, which is allegedly making fake drugs, a narcotics division, STAND came into being. After being hired, she is not just tasked with hiring officers with law enforcement abilities but other individuals from different fields like medical, business, academic to assist her in the investigation. It’s not just her detective abilities and experience that she is recruited by STAND but the one major reason that she has been hired is that her body is immune to drugs.
Rei is a powerful and the only female character in the series. She is different and can be related to the real life. She seems week but she is a very devoted and intelligent detective. She works with good intentions in mind which is overwhelming but she also has the ability to learn from her faults when her good intentions turns into a bad decision. She investigates things that she is not tasked to investigate but she get some clues, she doesn’t hesitate to pursue that because she knows that she is not doing anything wrong.
As we didn’t warn you for the spoiler so we won’t be revealing about the antagonist of the series but the true antagonist is a big shock for the viewers. Even if you could predict the antagonist, you will be surprised by the time you reach the climax. The antagonist he completely justified to the extent you would not be against him and you would end up wondering about his intentions that are not completely wrong and make sense.
Although there is only Japanese version of the game one thing that is good about this anime, especially for the fans of the game is that the character design is faithful to the game. Even the voice actors are the same that include Yuki Kaji who played the role of Haru, Daisuke Namikawa played the role of Shun and Tomokazu voiced Itsuki.
One big flaw in this series is that it is too short to cover the story of all characters sue to which it seems incomplete. The anime consist of only 12 episodes The characters and their personality is taken from the game and how they communicate with the female lead but they don’t seem to be significant. Most of the characters seems like the typical otome characters. There is variety of those typical otome characters but none of them have been given a proper story. Rei is the only character with a proper character development.
There is no proper explanation in the series regarding the illegal drugs. The reason why Oomori Pharmaceutical is being investigated by STAND and Rei is because they are involved in formulating the drugs that can be illegal but the series didn’t cleared out why. Apart of the formula used to make those drugs there were no other details shown. They also didn’t show whether Oomori had these drugs prepared in their own labs or are they linked to some drugs alliances. The STAND may not be easy to understand by the non-Japanese people as Japan is no lenient when it comes to drugs and some very common medicines are also illegal in Japan. So the purpose of STAND may be hard to understand by other viewers. One other thing that is not explained with logical details is the immunity of Rei. There are some scenes in the start that gives a very little explanation but we didn’t get to see more than that and the reason is still not been logically explained completely.
Anime of 12 episodes are preferred by the anime fans but it doesn’t seems to be the good thing in Stand my heroes. Other than Rei none of these huge as of characters play any role in the development of the story. They are very good looking and that can be an amusement for many viewers but to many viewers it also seems useless. Probably, more episodes could make it work but it can’t be guaranteed. However, these characters could have been used in the story and to explain some aspects of the story.
