I should start out by saying I don't think Overlord is horrible. There have been many series I have given up either because I found them to be utter garbage or boring and going nowhere. The fact that I watched this show through to its conclusion means it was at least watchable.
With that said, the entire time I watched this show, I could not help but get the idea out of my head that was I reading a fan fiction that some guy wrote about how awesome everything would be if his fantasy MMO character was stuck in a real world based on those same rules.
At this point I could post
spoilers ahead but to be honest, if you've watched only the first episode of the series, by the time you get through the opening theme in Episode 2 it has basically told you the plot and any twists of the entire show. There is nothing overall deep or thought provoking done by the show that you can't surmise from watching the OP a few times, including guessing all the plot twists.
The show is about a Japanese store clerk who played an MMO (with deep dive virtual reality technology very similar to SAO) that his guild has largely abandoned. The server is going down in a few hours and he decides to see it off to the very end before heading to work the next day. A countdown clock ticks down to midnight and instead of being logged off, he finds himself trapped in his avatar's body, to a land similar to the online game, tended to by an army of NPC's come-to-life, most of whom were programmed by former guild members.
All of the NPC's in his care revere him and praise him. We establish the idea very early that he is extremely powerful and rich with in-game currency. And that's where the first problem with Overlord becomes exposed Other than Ains (as he has his minions call him), none of the other primary/secondary characters have any development at all. They are all overpowered and absurdly devoted to him. Most of their conversations consist of either praising Ains or talking amongst each other about who is the most obsequiously devoted to him.
Beyond this, there is no real drama. We find out very quickly that Ains and his followers are light years beyond the power of anyone else in this universe and so a fair bit of his caution, while understandable, also leads to both ridiculous round about plans and no tension. This latter point is because at no point in this entire show is there any question about whether any of the main cast will be hurt or die. In the second third, he confronts two villains from a neighboring country who are well established to be stronger than most but they are still ants to our hero. At no point do we ever think the old man necromancer (whose name escapes me) or Clementine or a legitimate threat despite all being much stronger than any regular human in this series's universe.
As stated earlier, not much really happens in Overlord. Our protagonist's grand plan is this convoluted strategy of posing as a dark knight (because he feels the overwhelming need to understand the melee mechanics of this world) and get his name under this pseudonym spread across the land so that somehow then his actual real persona as the overlord lich king can be known across the land. If none of that makes sense that's the point.
Ains slaughters an entire mercenary army and briefly touches upon how taking the lives of others doesn't seem to bother him, as his personality is being taken over by his character. That would have been a fascinating issue to grapple with, similar to Grimgar of Fantasy & Ash. Perhaps the character could have afterwards great misgivings about what he did or a true moral crisis about weather the morality of our own society can or should be applicable in this fantasy world. In the beginning, he asks one of his buxom female servants if he can grope her chest, ostensibly to test the mechanics of the world and while this servers as little more than fan service, this might have also been an interesting an refreshing route to go in exploring the ideas of if a relationship could exist in such conditions, especially considering her devotion was a result of a last minute programming change made before the MMO was supposed to shut down. Or heck, they could have gone a more hentai route and even that would have been more interesting than where this show went.
I confess I enjoy the "trapped in another MMO" trope. I was a fan of
the first season of Sword Art Online - albeit the first half more than
the second that featured a damsel in distress Asuna as well as Log
Horizon. If we're willing to extend that genre to being in a fantasy
world, Re: Zero and Konosuba were two of my favorite shows of last year.
I had heard decent things about Overlord so I thought I should give it a
try.
And that's where I get to the title of my post. Throughout it, I kept thinking, as someone who played an MMO at one time (RIP City of Heroes) that I could have written something on par with this when I was in high school. The thought of Eric Cartman, from South Park, being just a little older and in the same circumstance kept coming to me. Realistically an animated version of Clyde Frog or Polly Prissypants would have just been as believable in this show and would have fit in telling the character how awesome he was.
I'd have to call this series a skip, at least for now. A second season somehow got green lit, which shows what I know about anime, and so I may check it out to see if perhaps the snails pace of a story changes or if anything interesting happens (perhaps anything that is a legitimate threat to Ains), but for now this thirteen episodes if a solid "meh" for me.
I should start out this review by saying that I am not normally a fan of the "magical girl" genre. As a thirty-something father of two, I also certainly don't typically fall into the target demographic for this sort of show.
