Log Horizon
Sorry, I meant,…
Database, database~!!♫♪♫♪
(some light spoilers in it)
It starts with an interesting concept, humans trapped in a MMO world, but in a literal sense (unlike SAO, for example), thousands transported to another world, without idea of why or how to get out.
What world is this? Why are they trapped there? Who is behind it? Is the fantasy world a legitimate world and they were teleported to it or it’s all a big virtual experience done by… aliens? Magicians? Who knows
For people who likes speculative sci-fi, it can be very interesting.
Using a very fantasy/scifi concept and then looking at it through the lens of realism (as the adventurers comes from our real world) can be engaging. What would be happen if it would happen really? One imagine people going crazy and depressed, trying to find a way out, then progressively society would be re-established, as trade, laws are needed, people gravitating in groups with time, etc.
Shamefully, this is just the potential, which isn’t fully realized in this anime/LN.
The first 5 episodes in particular are bad, where all the characters, main or otherwise, don’t react as real people.
They aren’t in SHOCK as they should be, or in denial, I almost could expect but don’t see grow men crying, as much you see a few people abated sitting down in the background. The protagonists of course are immune to reacting like normal people, they are totally not worried and barely have problem with the situation! And no one in general in the entire world seems worried of being in a fricking videogame nor show real interest or purpose on discovering what the world is and how to return to Earth. In particular, it seems no one cares for their loved ones, nor their family nor their friends. I mean, there should be people who are dad and moms in their real world and miss their children. In all the series there is only a single mention of it, Crusty says he misses his little sister (it HAD to be a little sister, this comes from a LN!).
Or we have Akatsuki that starts “roleplaying” a ninja and calling Shiroe master in the first episode. Yeah, because when you are trapped in an potentially alien world, roleplaying a ninja as if you were in a normal video game is the normal thing. Can anyone slap that idiot?
In fact we have a very weird situation where in all the series, the adventurers somehow choose to go on in their assumed roles and still be “adventurers”, warrior and mages, crafters; where are their real selves? The teachers? the housewives, the IT workers, the lawyers, the construction workers, the college students, etc? Everyone seems to have conveniently forgotten their real lives, career, family, etc. Because just because someone plays a barbarian in a video game, it shouldn’t mean he is a barbarian in his real personality, but maybe he is a doctor. Just a single mention of it, Henrietta seems to have a business college title.
But of course we also have Naotsugu saying “panties!” and then receiving a smack each time and several other characters being animu~! rolling in the ground or being moe or squeeing when they see something cute so clearly my expectatives of the writing are wrong and I shouldn’t expect anything realistic or sensible or logic. The plot isn’t really “real humans trapped in a MMO world” but “LN/anime characters trapped in a MMO world”, if you catch my drift.
Even Shiroe, the main character, is a typical character in Light Novels, another “smart guy with glasses that fight with tactics over brawn”. I suppose at this point there is a big entry in tvtropes about the trope. At least I liked when they mention he is an undergraduate engineer in some university, it ties with his analytical ways.
Once admitted that underwhelming side of the story and all its weak points, it actually has interesting parts and decent writing in there, as we’ll see forward.
The first fights are overloaded with infodumps, extraneous explanations that are repeated twice usually (one in the middle of the fight and another in the end as summary, because they really needed to explain what a sleep spell did), and for my tastes they border too much with real MMOs, which I find… limiting. Aggro, cooldown managements, roles in a party, crowd control, it’s like seeing a twitch channel of a mmo, jeez. From what I read in other forums some people eat that shit, I suppose because they are MMO players and they like to speculate in the inner workings of this mmo but meh, here you have a fight where the final twist was the leader timing well the cooldown for a spell to produce damage almost twice in a row. FFS, how it’s the thrilling… it isn’t.
Fourth episode has a villainous baddie they have to beat, a totally boring and evil player killer. Eww. I was about to drop the series at this point. But the next day I went on with the series in a whim. Fifth episode is a very transitional one, not a lot happens, in fact the series has a few ones like this one, slow episodes.
Sixth episode (seventh, really) is when the series gets better. A whole lot of social manipulation, a closer examination of how the world works with a strange meld of real life factors and RPG stats, faction vs faction interaction, a smart plot, conflict of interests between various parties and examination of ethics (you can see the powerful guilds knew about what was going on but they wanted the xp pots and they were looking to the other side) and finally some consideration of the situation where they are and a beginning of a true organization as government, the possible need of laws (even if death isn’t possible, kidnapping is as they’ve shown and there are lots of crimes still possible), etc. Here is when I can say the writing start doing interesting, worthwhile things. All mixed with some rescue action.
Next plot is also good, as the “npcs” aren’t really npcs and they have their own will, their own factions and society. Diplomatic encounter ensues, with several possible outcomes, from peace to war to everything in between. But here the series show a decidedly languid pace, they are 5 or 6 full episodes in the castle in meetings, balls, and what should do, what they are thinking of us, etc. It’s an interesting situation, but it could have been done a little bit faster? In other narrative thread they present us with another party of young adventurers (funny how all the kids have kid characters and adult have adult characters, even if we know it doesn’t really have that way, like Akatsuki being in a male character at first or the cat swashbuckler, who I doubt it’s a cat in real life, but what did you expect of anime lol). The younglings party present us with the basics of tactics, how friendship form in them, and give us a bit of action, as the main character isn’t going to have a lot of that in his narrative thread.
The final part is pretty meh, a pair of almost SoL episodes, and a final small arc where both the situation (a festival!), the problem (people complaining, provoking small attempts of fights, and making petty disputes!), the response (“guards” and clerks trying to solve the disputes) and the solution (throw more bodies to fix the problem!) are all underwhelming as final arc, the only worthwhile part is the revelation at the end, which I won’t spoil, of course.
Characterization wise, the characters themselves don’t have really good character arcs.
We have Shiroe the mc who has his own mini-Arc about him being a loner as he distanced himself from the people and now gaining trust again in groups, and apart of that we have little else: Crusty seems to have some battlelust under the perfect knight persona, Rundelhaus who really wants to be an adventurer, Minori admires Shiroe and wants to be like him, and… uh… I’m searching for scraps already.
They go more for quantity than quality in the series, with more than 30 named characters and a decent amount with their own povs apart from the mc. Quantity in this case brings variety, from warriors to merchants to nobility to people from different factions and levels and perspectives.
In other words, this is the kind of series where the characters are pieces of the board, and it’s the board (all the worldbuilding) who is the star.
Romance wise, it’s almost null. There are two or three pairs forming but in very innocent slow way. It shows this is a LN/anime in how they touch the part of love, romance and adult relationships: a mix of ignoring it, for jokes, badly, and/or in the most innocent of the ways. In fact, have you noticed there is no couples in all the 25 episodes of the series? Despite most players being 20 something, it seems. I’m not talking of the main characters, there is no established couples in any of the secondary or tertiary characters. You could imagine some married couple playing the MMO and being transported in to the world or some couples forming in the months they already lived in the world.
Overall I would say the writing is somewhat better than your average anime, with an interesting world building and some intelligence throw in some of the situations and how the groups react to it, but you know, it’s still far away of being a really good work, it’s well under and far away from a good scifi novel for example. It serves you as a reminder how bad is the average writing in anime is, in a way, lol.
Highlights of the series was their own fictional character making fun of the whole “touches up glasses” doing the gesture without having glasses and how they recruited the adventurers for the goblin battle: with ‘mmo female armor’ (you know what I mean) and the power of moe.
