Friday, June 10, 2016

Day 11: Log Horizon Review

I've spent about two hours writing and rewriting the opening paragraph of this review. I kept trying open it up by talking about the similar, but more popular show Sword Art Online. At the end of the day I've decided that I really don't like that idea. This show deserves to stand on it's own, and shouldn't be compared to another show to validity it. Log Horizon is a very good show. It really is my second favorite anime of all time, and I feel it is like that even without SAO this show should still be praised. However one of the major aspect of the show are at their best only when they are compared to shows like Sword Art Online and .Hack, so I will be comparing the show to other in only one aspect, but we'll get there. For now welcome to a review of Log Horizon.



Plot:
Elder Tales is a popular MMORPG around the world. For some people this world is more well loved then the real world. But for some people the world will become very real for them. After a patch updates the game everyone who was logged in at the time waked up in the world of Elder Tales. One of these players is named Shiroe. Shiroe is a a brilliant planer who ends up making it his mission to make this world the best possible world it could be for both players and NPCs.

The first thing this show does that I find really interesting is that the original summary of this show sounds more like a prison escape kinda show. However the main character's goals are not how to escape from the world, but how to live in this world. This goal is really the driving force of our characters.The goal get's divided into finding a diving force for people to get motivated by, creating a government for all the players, creating relations with the NPC's governments in order to not start a war, and maintaining all of these things once they have been established. It is a little unorthodox for a show like this (one with 25 episode seasons) to have an arc based story. I'm actually grateful for this because as a marathoner it gives me a good place to take breaks in between my watching.

Action in this show is very technical based. The first characters in the party are a tank, support, and assassin, so for them to win fights they have to think tactically. As such the fight tend to be fairly slow, but I'm a big fan of shows that have the heroes taunt the main opponent about how they just outsmarted them (Note: talk about Leverage one of these days). As such this show's action really works for me.

The biggest thing that set's this show apart form other things like SAO is that the world of Elder Tales feels like a videogame. Yes, SAO had heath bars, but outside of that it was basically any other generic fantasy world. Thanks to it's slow pace Log Horizon is able to take time to develop each character class and shows that this is an actual game that people would enjoy and play.

I just reread this article, and I have to say I'm ashamed of it. Their is just so much I want to talk about this show, but at the time I'm writing this I am very tired. If I don't write this now I will be failing this challenge, and that is something I do not want to do. But the sad thing about all of this means that I just can't write about all I want to do without it coming off as a lot worse then it really is. The honest truth is that this show is amazing. Out of all the anime I've watched this show is only topped by one other (which will be a talk for tomorrow). I will be talking about this show again before the month is over and talking about the various character to help convince you again, but that is a story for another day. For now let's all grab some sleep. I'll see you tomorrow for my favorite anime ever. And let me warn you, it's going to be a long one.

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