What They Say:
One day, while playing the online game Elder Tales, 30,000 players suddenly find themselves trapped in another world. There, eight-year veteran gamer Shiroe also gets left behind. The trapped players are still alive, but they remain in combat with the monsters. The players don’t understand what has happened to them, and they flee to Akiba, the largest city in Tokyo, where they are thrown into chaos. Once proud of his loner lifestyle, Shiroe forms a guild called Log Horizon with his old friend Naotsugu, female assassin Akatsuki and others.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Sword Art Online was a huge success and continues to be one of the most visible anime titles in recent memory. But the idea itself wasn’t particularly new – the idea of players being trapped in a fiction setting that once served as a world of entertainment and relaxation is, while not a commonly used trope in anime and manga, is one we’ve seen a few times. But SAO really hit it out of the park (well, the first half anyway – let’s just forget Episodes 14 and forward exist) and executed on the idea of the story rather well.
So it should be no surprise that Log Horizon takes lessons from SAO but tries to tell the story it wants to tell. Too often when a series does well, there are other series that try and imitate without bringing anything new to the table, and most just fall flat. In the beginning, at least, Log Horizon seems to be taking some notes from SAO, but is very much saying “we want to tell our own story.”
SAO gave the audience a significant amount of information up front in the first episode – crafter of the game has trapped everyone in the game world, they have to beat it to escape, and if they die in the game they die in real life. Pretty cut and dry for the most part, and the story focused more on the characters and their relationships and how they tackled the challenging world around them. Horizon, on the other hand, gives almost nothing away in this first episode.
We meet Shiroe, who is our main protagonist and veteran of the MMORPG Elder Tales, waking up in what appears to be the game world for Elder Tales but having no memory of why he is there. Turns out – nobody does. And while this may shock some of you, most of you won’t be surprised to learn that the handy ‘Log Out’ button doesn’t work either. The servers were loaded with a new expansion, titled ‘The Novasphere Pioneers’, and as soon as the patch went live, several thousands of players found themselves in the game world with not a clue among them how they arrived there. This event becomes known simply as ‘The Apocalypse’.
Shiroe goes through his lengthy contacts list and meets up with Naotsugu, a somewhat perverted Guardian-class character as well as female ninja Akatsuki. Together, they begin to get their bearings in the world, including setting out to combat some low level monsters to try and figure out how to use their powers in the heat of real battle.
The end of the episode leaves us with a cliffhanger as a new character is introduced, a young girl being chased by rather surly and brutish looking men, with a strange cat-humanoid character watching the whole affair from the shadows. Is he friend or foe? Who is the young girl in danger? These questions and many more are left for the audience to ponder until next week’s episode.
In Summary:
There are some basic level things that come up with you construct the whole “You’re trapped in a game world and have to survive” kind of world building. What I really like that they did in Log Horizon that they sort of handwave in other shows, is that the food – all tastes precisely the same. And drinks all taste like water. Why? Because it was never meant to actually have real taste and flavor. This is a pretty disappointing truth for our band of heroes to learn, but it’s a little touch that not only serves as a nice moment of humor but also gives the audience more information into the world of Elder Tales.
Another big thing I like that they address in this show is the question of players characters. In SAO, everyone was warped to look like their real-life self in the first episode, so there were no secrets – what you saw was what you got. However, being forced into the role of your character in Elder Tales presents some challenges; Shiroe trips a few times in this episode because he notes, “my character is taller than I am in real life”. Naotsugu made his character the same height as himself, so he has little trouble maneuvering around. Akatsuki, amusingly enough made her character a male avatar. A handy shape-shifting potion from Shiroe helps her not only correct her now VERY problematic gender-bending but also allows her to resize her character to more closely resemble her size and build in real life.
These little touches in this first episode really set this show apart in my mind from what could be just a senseless copy/paste job with new faces and names. It’s still not even clear HOW our heroes are in the game world, or if they’re even in a game world at all – but the fuzziness of their situation I think lends a lot to the setup the show is asking the audience to believe – and I for one am excited to see where they take it – so long as they don’t jump the shark.
Grade: B+
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Intel Alienware laptop, Windows 7, 17’ Screen at 1600×900 resolution
Could be interesting, based on what I’ve read here. I didn’t care for the contrived, brow-raising explanation for how Kirito ‘n Co. were trapped in SAO so perhaps skipping the explanation of how these people were shanghaied is the better move. From the review I guess I can’t hold out hope that they went for a more plausible, BTOOOM!-like “trapped in a video game” scenario, can I ?
I hope that this is better than SAO but, sadly, I think that SAO was so low that a show could be worlds above SAO and yet still not be truly good. Oh well.