Log Horizon Episode 1

Hey everyone! Lin here! I'm very pleased to announce that I will be taking over the anime overviews of 'Log Horizon'...what a pleasure! This anime is one that came out during the fall of last year and though it was recommended to me by a very good friend of mine, I never took the time to watch it till now. And boy do I regret it...I loved it at first episode!
Note: This post will be longer than the rest of the posts because it's an introduction to this anime and a lot of its components. Proceeding overviews of this anime will be noticeably shorter.

Ever since the Sword Art Online (SAO) opened up internationally, the idea of a Virtual Reality (VR) world in anime has gotten bigger than ever. Sure there was .hack and and Accel World, but those did not explode at an international scale as SAO did for some reason (I could argue about region privacy and lack of publicity in other countries, but that'd be a different topic entirely). Log Horizon is the same theme of VR...yet is a different flavor all together.

The amount of players is pretty damn high. The world in the game is separated from where you are originally from...and based on some research, the people in Akihibara are all from Tokyo, Japan.

Like in SAO, players are, arguably, trapped in an MMORPG game. I say "arguably" because the anime shows that the game itself is 2D, flat and on a PC...it does not involve headgear or headsets. How they actually got stuck in the game is a mystery, especially in the first episode. There are 4 base classes: Warrior classes, weapon-based classes, Healer classes and lastly Mage classes. Subsequently, these base classes have three job classes that are in them each, so for example, in the Healer base class, there's Cleric, Druid and Kannagi (Shinto priests and mikos). Since I'm only covering episode one, I'll only explain what they talk about in this episode, but I will say that little by little we learn about how the game works and honestly it's really exciting for a big dumb nerd like me...! :> This is actually one of the reasons why I like the anime so far...it's quite technical in terms of the how the game itself works.

A pretty small amount of characters you'll end up getting to know. In the first episode, you find out that all food tastes like rice crackers, but that changes when a certain someone comes around...

What I liked about LH is how they introduced the characters; though they were introduced, the anime saw it better fit to introduce the characters according to what they can do, instead of having the audience remember certain personalities. This really helps, since we can associate looks to ability and then fill in the rest as the episodes continue...afterall, it doesn't really make sense for a person to show everything that they're about within the first few minutes they have screen time. Being subtle about their personalities and traits was done well for the first episode.

A rather serious and anti-social person, Shiroe is a genius strategist and enchanter. Enchanters are a class that has spells that don't do much damage by themselves, but instead amplify the damage dealt by their party. This dependancy unfortunately makes it the least picked class in the game.

The first person we see is the main character, Shiroe, an enchanter and strategist. The short, yet action packed intro, showing him micromanaging a party of 3 including himself. To be honest, he really reminds me of someone I know, both in looks and in demeanor and it kind of tickles me a little. He is a very observant and intelligent man who appears to have many connections. He dislikes the idea of joining a guild, probably because he himself isn't a very social person.

The tank of the group, Naotsugu is usually in the front line...he's also the anime's comic relief! There isn't much information about him, other than knowing he's twenty-five, two years older than Shiroe.

Naotsugu is the second person we see: a sturdy heavy tank class. In the episode, he seems very happy-go-lucky, though I feel like he's the type to be serious when things go awry. In a way he works as the anime's comic relief and the opposite of Shiroe's social issue.

Though it looks like she's a middle schooler, Akatsuki is actually twenty years old in real life. She plays the assassin class, the one with the highest physical DPS in the game.

And lastly, Akatsuki (not to be confused with the Naruto group...) is an assassin from the weapon based class. She is swift, quiet and, in the beginning got a sex change! :> She's an extreme roleplayer who dedicates herself as Shiroe's personal ninja.

Shiroe and Naotsugu with a rather relaxed attitude after finding out they're stuck in the game.

The one thing that I found rather fascinating is the way that everyone seemed to react to suddenly being trapped in the game. Everyone wasn't screaming, panicking or going crazy. Granted, I'm sure many were worried and confused...they were basically shoved into the unknown. Whether they die permanently...or they  respawned no one knew, but reasonably no one wanted to take that chance. They didn't have a great almighty GM tell them that they would die in real life if they died here and really, who was to say everyone was going to actually believe something like that? GMs are the developers, yes, but they are a person just like everyone who was playing.

If I can make it rain like this in the game, why wouldn't I want to be in it?

And also when I think about it, say there are people who panic, I think there would be a lot more people standing there, contemplating whether or not this was truly bad or not. In this day and age (especially in Japan) there are lots of people who would rather live in a video game world and not our own. I mean that's why VR headsets like the Occulus Rift exist...to bring a gamer even closer to the gameplay. Moreover, some people just rather live in a fantasy world...they could actually touch fairies, eat with cat people or fight battles alongside your friends. Something like that sounds rather cool, no? Granted, there were some people who were devastated to find out that they couldn't log out, but LH's lack of mad drama, unlike in the first episode of SAO, was both rather refreshing and realistic and made me think about the idea more.

The new patch, along with making the players stuck in the game, poses a new challenge to them which they must approach with caution.

When I first started the anime, I figured that I would see new players jump into the world and get better...however I was surprised when I saw that all of them were max level (Level 90)!! "Something's gotta be up with this..." was my first thought. Wasn't it too suspicious to have the characters at max level? They could simply blast everything in sight. I was very pleased to see that I was right...they did have something up their sleeve. Besides gathering their bearings about suddenly being stuck in the game, they had to deal with the new large patch that changed the game. They couldn't reach for their command lists to do abilities, the cap for max level went from Lvl 90 to over a hundred, and mobs were a mystery. They weren't sure whether or not the mobs just outside of the town were even safe...this patch could have changed everything! This aspect makes the people in the game veterans of the game, but still blind...they were explorers of a world that was familar, yet they could not always depend on their prior knowledge, only have it as a light reference.

All in all, I felt like Episode 1 is a showing of an extremely promising anime that, I will argue, stands next to or even above the famous SAO. It's more technical approach made me really wanna play a class MMORPG again and the lack of drama (though there will be some, just not about the same kinds of things) shows that it truly isn't trying to copy SAO in any way. It grants the audience comedy beyond the seriousness and the system of the game is explained slowly and thoroughly. I really hope you guys try to pick up this anime!