World Fraction
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)
This is by far and away the single episode fans of the main story of Log have been waiting for. Shiroe’s conversation with the mysterious mage from last episode reveals a significant amount of how the players now interact with the world.
To put in a single phrase: The World Fraction spell. We usually think of magic as separated by what it does (Fire, Ice, Lightning, Healing, etc.) But you can also classify it on scale – single battles, armies, cities, continents…even the World. Which, apparently, has happened a grand total of three times in Elder Tale.
The first was 350 in-game years ago, which caused the creation of demi-humans (like goblins) and resulted in the creation of The Precursors (think historical awesome badass champions, but that’s about all we’re given). It also signaled the eradication of an entire race in the game, and the few that were left as slaves eventually gave birth the half-alv race, which Shiroe is. The conversation eventually explains an in-game reason for monsters spawning (they’re in fact resurrecting), as well as the second use of the World Fraction spell, which brought the Adventurers to the world of Elder Tale (and lines up at the start of Beta for the game.)
The discussion is then turned to the idea of mind and body, and what happens when someone dies in the game. The short, non-technical version is that memories are lost, closely related to how long the player was dead. Pre-Apocalypse (or third World Fraction spell?) players in the real world were effectively the memory, and the character in the game was the body. If your character died, no worries, you remembered what you did. But now that they’re in Elder Tale, it follows that when an Adventurer dies, they lose memories. How much, and how severe is unknown, but it’s disturbing, and the relation to the PCs and demi-humans is also considerably jarring.
Shiroe learns a great deal, and contemplates the meaning of all of this. Players losing memories, forgetting the real world, their families, is a horrible thought. And a deeper question that’s touched on but not directly brought up, is how this affects the demi-humans of the world – what do they remember, not remember, etc. How does that change the way they are? How they act? These are all big questions, and while we got some major answers for the series, many more were brought up in the process. In the closing scenes of the episodes, with a dire face, Shiore decides that, for the moment at least, he will conceal this information from the rest of the Round Table, possibly until he himself better understands it.
In Summary:
F-I-N-A-L-L-Y! Finally! We finally get some advancement into the plot that was raised at the beginning of the series. Not only that, but we get some insight into the worlds history and how it lines up with what happened in the real world. This was a very refreshing and exciting episode and is well welcomed after what feels like a lull in the series presenting the audience with great, engaging stories of characters in the world of Elder Tale. Though we don’t get all the answers, we’re given some, which lead to bigger and in many cases, much more scarier questions. Remember all those jerk PKers at the beginning of the series? What happened to all those people they hurt? Do they still remember their families? Or even who they were in the real world? Or are they just fine and lost a few days time?
We don’t know, and that’s part of what makes these revelations so engaging and interesting – by raising more questions, they’ve given us a lot more of the world to understand, explaining older questions that lead to new ones. Shiroe’s decision to keep this information to himself for now also opens up many great doors for more character development between the main cast of Akihabara characters, and I’m itching to see what happens next.
The majority of the episode is about these revelations, and the World Fraction spell, while a little is devoted to the Training Camp and our merry band of can’t-get-their-stuff-together. It’s hinted that one of them knows an answer to why they’ve been failing, and thinks that going into the dungeon in the afternoon will somehow change the absolute beating they’ve been taken, but again, like instances in past episodes, it’s not engaging, and doesn’t really develop the characters much. With the turn at the Conference with the People of the Land and the revelations of the World Fraction, I hope that the Training Camp follows suite.
Grade: A-
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Intel Alienware laptop, Windows 7, 25” HP2509m screen at 1920×1080 resolution
