Attack of the Killer Fishmen!
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)
The training camp is winding to a close. As I had suspected previously, this episode was mostly dedicated to Minori and the rest of your younger player group finally realizing why they were getting beaten in the dungeon so o much, and working it through with the power of team work. Unsurprisingly, none of them coordinated with each other…so fights were just generally a mess. Also unsurprisingly, when they learn what everyone’s abilities do, and how they work, they’re able to fair significantly better in the dungeon, and everyone’s happy and proud for actually taking the time to sit down and talk instead of just charging headlong into packs of angry skeletons.
If that was all that happened in this episode I’d be pretty upset, but there are two interesting developments as well. Isuzu, the Bard of Minori’s group, has become friends with the (somewhat arrogant and flamboyant sorcerer) Rudy. After successfully doing a large portion of the dungeon on the eve of their last day, Isuzu wants to add Rudy to her friends list, but finds that the request is continually reject by system – she isn’t allowed to add him, which evokes a “What the hell?” look from her, and a bit of a stunned hand-in-the-cookie-jar look from Rudy. In previous episodes, there’s two things that have stuck out that seem to indicate he /might/ be a Person of the Land, the NPCs of the world. One is that he has a whimsical, but not entirely sensible reason for not joining guilds. The second, is that in a few episodes back, when someone was examining him and his class, he had a name like everyone else, but he also had ‘Code’ after his name. I didn’t think much of it then, but Isuzu seems to have stumbled onto something pretty weird…
Remember those demi-humans? The ones that continually resurrect and that the Adventurers were brought to Elder Tale to fight and help keep under control? Well that weird thing happening in the water on the horizon of the beach was in fact an army of fishmen. Relatively low level, they’re pretty easily dispatched by even young adventurers. But if you multiply their numbers by several hundred or thousand…you have a severe problem on your hands the like of which was described as almost bring about the end of civilization in Elder Tale from last episode. The teachers try to rally the students to themselves to retreat before they can be overwhelmed by the fishmen, but the dire implications of this sudden appearance does not bode well for the Training Camp, Akihabara, and possibly all of the continent.
In Summary:
This episode was almost pretty lame, but the last few minutes saved it. It’s been the same problem since the beginning – Minori, Isuzu, and the rest of their group kept getting their tails kicked in the dungeon, and they kept just running into the same wall over and over again. The characters never really learned, grew, or even interacted with each other much, save for very brief and forgettable moments between Isuzu and Rudy, and Minori talking with Shiroe. So it’s no surprise, or really entertaining, that talking suddenly makes them closer and able to work together. It’s just boring and feels very forced “show off the power of teamwork” kinda junk. This little subplot actually had a lot of potential for some good side characters to get some screen time, but I feel like the majority of it has been wasted. While I find the “strange” occurance of Rudy not being selected as a friend for Isuzu, the series has tried to make their relationship something we want to be invested in but to me has just failed pretty hard in that regard. The implication of what Rudy is far more interesting at this point than what impact it might have on Isuzu or the others. But it is interesting all the same.
The appearance of the fishmen is also not entirely surprising but again, has great implications for some awesome stuff that could be down the line. With Crusty, Shiroe, and the others far away, if the Fishmen push much more inland than there they already are now, Akihabara can be in some serious trouble. Considering the next episode is titled ‘Return of the Goblin King’ – I think our heroes are in store for some pretty overwhelming challenges in the near future. These events are mimicking a lot of the history of the world that Shiroe learned about in the last episode, and I have a feeling the scale of the show, and the stakes for the players and the world they’re in, are about to go up significantly in the near future.
Grade: B
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Intel Alienware laptop, Windows 7, 25” HP2509m screen at 1920×1080 resolution
