Note: This review covers only the first season of Log Horizon.

Log Horizon, at first glance, seems just an anime trying to ride the “stuck in a video game” trend that was bumped by Sword Art Online a few years ago. The first set of episodes are filled with your typical nerdgasm, with plenty of MMO terms, ingame menus popping around characters, references to classes, skills, mechanics, and everything else you would expect from an anime that desperately tries to please a growing audience.

It’s hard to stick around after this kind of start, but Log Horizon manages to bring topics and developments to its story that succeed in putting it above mediocrity. It does that by mainly remaining honest with itself, never ever trying to make this show a grand debate about life, romance, or the concept of friendship, but also because it explores some other interesting paths that could only be approached by a show based on video game concepts.

This tale starts as Shiroe, our protagonist, suddenly finds himself stuck in the world of Elder Tale, a long-running MMORPG that had just received a new update. Along with him, plenty of other gamers are imprisoned in this new world, which uses a replica of our world map in a half-sized scale and has the hub-city of Akihabara as the main gathering place for players and non-players characters alike. Well… what happens next?

It could go anywhere

Unlike what Sword Art Online tried a few years ago, Log Horizon doesn’t kickstart with a villain declaring a horrible experiment or with a run for life about people dying in the game and an immediate need to get out. Instead, in this world of Elder Tale, the players can revive indefinitely, they remain incredibly strong, can communicate with each other normally, and so on. The only drawbacks are the removal of the fast-travel mechanics and the fact that people have to control their characters differently, now that they actually have to move their bodies.

It could go anywhere from here. It could try dramatic events, a thrilling run for life, or anything else where thousands of young-adults and teenagers are banded together with superpowers and monsters to fight. What it does, however, is wildly… different.

Not exactly what it is

It’s weird that people have no urge to get back to reality, that comments about missing their parents, siblings, and real-life friends are almost nonexistent. In fact, it can get frustrating to see how superficial every character is in this show. It seems that they are completely detached from their real-life forms, as they meet thousands of others and we have no dialogue where they speak about what they do, where they live, or how they are outside of the game.

Log Horizon, instead, takes an approach that basically removes the “stuck” part of a “stuck in a MMO” subgenre. Well, you get the rare mention to the game being a “game” and one or two lines about someone’s job in real life, but that’s it. Log Horizon is, in reality, a generic medieval fantasy tale with MMO elements tucked everywhere. It just mentions about people getting stuck in a game to attract an already existing fanbase of hyped individuals, a boring trick, nothing more.

The People of the Land

However, as it starts developing itself as a generic medieval fantasy show with colorful knights and adventurers, Log Horizon manages to achieve an interesting idea: in this world of Elder Tale, the adventurers are just some weird-ass immortal alien forces. The real inhabitants of this world are the NPCs, those random people walking in towns giving quests and the like.

When whatever happened… happened, the players got stuck in the game, but the NPCs became like real people, with their own politics, nobility, way of life, etc. Now these bunch of young-adults and teenagers need to interact with real people, with kings, nobles, ancient sages, and other entities that have their own agenda and objective.

It does so decently

That’s the core of Log Horizon. Instead of being about the protagonist being an overpowerful asshole beating a game, it is about how this horde of new players will interact with the new world and the people that live in it. Shiroe may be powerful, but he is just an ordinary player that knows the game lore really well and is up to the challenge.

When Log Horizon takes this path, even the one-dimensional characters become more interesting, as you will see them interacting with the world in ways other than just killing monsters. The adventurers must form alliances amongst themselves, establish some form of government to keep things from going astray, and ultimately learn about this new world and where they fit. It’s an interesting approach that can keep us engaged far more than cheesy romance and cheater players killing everything with ass-pulled new powers.

It’s still Japan though…

Sadly. The first episodes already make this clear: we have lolis, we have dumb big-breasted girls, with have instant crushes over our “unorthodox” protagonist, and we have plenty of other problems.

The most problematic of them all is the group of new players that is introduced around the middle part of the show. While one would expect the story to kick in heavier by that time, instead we are thrown to this side-group of youngsters learning about the game… and gods, we waste too much time hearing about basic MMO terms, strategies, and cheesy talks about “we need to get stronger to stand on our own”. It’s a torture, especially because there are much more interesting things already happening in the story by the time these suckers take the spotlight.

Add that to a romantic triangle with underage girls and there’s a very high potential of things getting out of hand.

It’s a decent production too

It’s been a while since Satelight produced something as good as this. Of course it still pales in comparison with what Macross Frontier achieved nearly a decade ago, and there is much less demanding action and movement here, but Log Horizon looks mostly sharp, with some stunning background scenery and cute close-ups to our characters, even though they look like any generic medieval fantasy guys and girls with far too much bright colors in their garments and hair. The soundtrack also manages to be quite decent, with some epic themes popping at some points, but none of them really manage to bring forth an aura of MMORPGs, or at least none that I’ve played.

Log Horizon could do better. It may not be really about people being stuck in a MMO, but the show itself is stuck on boring tropes and erratic pace. Whenever it offers interesting events, it hammers us with explanations about MMO terms, whenever someone learns some secret, it bursts with new players learning how to fight and form a functional party.

It never gets thrilling, tense, or otherwise emotive, but Log Horizon still manages to get interesting. Its idea of exploring the NPCs of a game as real people and throwing players as super-power invaders can get really fun, and the story makes decent effort to put people together and explore the political aspects that are implied by the idea. It’s also very important that very little about the world is shown beforehand to us, and thus we learn about it alongside its characters, giving a much needed sense of mystery to what would be otherwise a simple generic medieval fantasy fare.

Not superb, yes, but Log Horizon may be the best modern incarnation of this genre that somehow got re-hyped by the terrible Sword Art Online.