The original predecessor of the series, titled 2B Hero, premiered online in mainland China in May 2015, but was halted by regulators after just one episode due to the sensitivity of its English title.

After being remade, the first season aired on Japanese TV in October 2016 under the new title To Be Hero, and later premiered online in mainland China in December 2016 under the same renamed title.

The second season, To Be Heroine (originally titled To Be Hero LEAF), released in 2018, tells a completely new storyline unrelated to the first, which was then retroactively renamed To Be Hero BABA.

A third series, To Be Hero X, was announced by bilibili and Aniplex in 2022 and premiered in April 2025, produced by BeDream, Bilibili, and Aniplex and animated by three studios: Studio LAN, Pb Animation Co., Ltd., and Paper Plane Animation Studio.

The first season was a Sino-Japanese co-production between Studio LAN, Haoliners Animation League, and its Japanese branch Emon, with Japanese production supervised by Shinichi Watanabe, and it aired simultaneously in Japan on Tokyo MX and in China on bilibili.

The show used different opening themes for each country: 'Insistence' (执念) performed by Loki (刘畅) for the Chinese release, and 'Come to See You' performed by BRATS for the Japanese release, while both versions shared the same ending theme, 'My Dad Protects the Earth', by Lin Heye.

On October 25, 2022, Diskotek Media released To Be Hero and To Be Heroine together on a single Blu-Ray limited to 2000 copies, marking the franchise's first home video release outside Asia.

The series follows an anthological format, meaning each season's storyline is largely unrelated to the others except for sharing the same universe and a common superhero theme.

In the second season, the character Ossan makes a cameo appearance after being possessed by a character from another world, Xiaoguang from the alternate dimension, causing him to begin losing weight in pursuit of the girl he loves.