IT’S TIME TO TALK SEQUELS!
As you know, or rather as you should know, a sequel season to an anime is both a blessing
and a curse.
The blessing comes from your reaction to it.
HOLY CRAP A NEW SEASON OF LOG HORIZON!
I LOVE THAT SHOW!
The curse comes from when you finish watching the show: WHY IS IT OVER?
I ONLY JUST GOT INTO IT AGAIN AND IT’S OVER!
WHY, CRUEL WORLD, WHYYYYYYYYYY!
This holds true with Log Horizon.
Because Log Horizon season one was a series I wholly enjoyed.
In the almost vast sea of stories trying to cash in on that MMO setting craze, it was
one that was entirely coherent and actually spent time developing its MMO world, you know
with actual mechanics and such, things about the world that only an MMO would have.
While others have similar premises, they also have settings that could very well just be
alternate universes with a fantasy setting rather than an MMO’s, which ends up looking
silly when even better shows come along that go the alternate universe route, but are more
convincing as a game world.
In general, this is depressing.
If you have this unique setting, USE IT!
And Log Horizon did.
Now I’m not going to sit here and say that season one of Log Horizon had a perfect ending,
it did not.
The overall problem introduced in the series is not resolved, that being that the characters
have not found a way to go home, nor have they made the final decision to even stop
looking.
It ends very much in a way you would expect from a story that is not yet finished, but
at the very least it left us not on a cliffhanger, but a narrative stopping point that felt good.
What added to this was that when the season ended, it wasn’t too long before the second
season was announced.
But now we have the second season, in fact I’m a bit late to the party as this second
season ended over a year ago, but even as I stand here, there is no word about a possible
season three, and this is a problem, because this show really needs one.
Ladies, gentlemen, and others, my name is Arkada and welcome to Glass Reflection.
Today, the sequel to the 2013 anime Log Horizon, Log Horizon 2.
Let’s Jam.
Now if you’ve watched my review on Log Horizon season one, then quite honestly not much has
changed as far as setting.
A bunch of MMO players wake up in a world that to them was the game they have been playing
so passionately for months or even years, for some of them.
Trapped for an unknown amount of time, these characters must adapt to the world and potentially
find a way out.
If not find a way out, then at the very least live good lives, which can be hard when even
this world is filled with assholes.
However, instead of just telling you to go watch my previous review for a more detailed
discussion of the setting, I have brought in my good friend Hive Leader, to explain
the MMO related parts of the plot, as he specializes in MMO’s and MMO-related by-products.
Thank you, Mr. Arkada.
As stated Log Horizon is in fact one of the few MMO related anime to get the actual MMO
part of the show right.
Even though our main characters aren’t bound by the limited commands of a mouse and keyboard,
the Adventurers, as they’re called, still have to play by the game’s rules and systems…
except when they don’t, but more on that later.
They have health bars, they have classes, they have levels, and probably the biggest
plot point in all of Log Horizon, when they die, they respawn.
This simple aspect that we MMO players take for granted has HUGE ramifications in Log
Horizon.
Adventurers are essentially immortal demi-Gods, and this creates extreme political tension
between The Adventures and the people of the land or as we know them, NPCs.
Season two really concentrates on this, with several of the plot lines exploring the consequences
of this reincarnation cycle.
That being said, where most modern day MMOs are heavily combat focused, Log Horizon has
always been more interested in discussing economy and politics.
It is also full of the most MATURE people I have ever seen.
As all of these Adventurers sit at a round table and discuss how to solve the financial
woes of Akihabara, I kept waiting for at least ONE to say they slept with someone’s mother
or to shout out a meme…
This must’ve been an RP server...
So where season one was all about our characters trying to survive within the game’s systems
and limitations, season two does something interesting.
It throws a LOT of this out the window by showing what happens when the game begins
to break as our Adventurers start to push Elder Tale to its limits.
Everyone let’s give a big hand to Hive Leader!
[Applause] But yes, season two is where the world of
Elder Tale starts to break down into a more homogenized mess of a world.
Where before there were plenty of times when you could clearly see the separation between
game mechanics and let’s call them real life mechanics, Season two starts to show
us much more of a blend, especially when more powerful MMO staples start to come into play.
Specifically moderator and admin powers.
Season two is when a lot of things that in an MMO would be left behind a curtain, like,
“Why do monsters drop money?
And where does that money come from?”
come into play.
In an MMO, this is just explained by “Well, it’s a game,” but Log Horizon can’t
take that route because there it’s a living breathing world, and it is quite fascinating
to see them attempt to bring a more rational reasoning behind many MMO and gaming concepts
that we take for granted.
They also don’t cheap out or anything and blame it all on some omnipotent god either,
which I very much appreciated as that would be the easy way out.
But ultimately Log Horizon has the same narrative problem as season one.
It suffers from a story not yet finished.
While previously we had balanced transitions between arcs, enough to give a good sense
of progression, a lot of the time here it feels more like padding.
Doesn’t help that quite a few of the plotlines for this season are, well, filler.
From what I gather, Season Two is attempting to adapt far less of the novel than Season
One, mostly because that’s all they had available to them.
So much of it feels like they spread the story out way too thin to cover 25 episodes, adding
in as much filler as they could.
Then there’s the ending.
The ending makes season two feel very much like a stopgap, the season continues the story,
yes.
It continues developing its world and fleshing out its characters sure, but in the end everything
has yet to come to a head.
Worse still, it does not end on any kind of narrative stopping point.
Instead, it ends almost on a cliffhanger, heavily implying what should/is going to happen
next.
But there may never be a next.
Not only are we over a year out from when this season aired, with no sequel announcement
unlike last time, but chances are that we are not getting one.
The anime has caught up with the original novel, and usually when this happens it depends
wholly on the original author to make enough story with enough speed as to still capitalize
on the popularity of the series as a whole.
However, earlier this year the author Mamare Touno was officially charged with corporate
tax evasion, and additionally the official Japanese twitter account for the series announced
in May that it was “Signing off for now…”
While you can look at that and think, “Ahh!
That’ll just take a bit of time to get everything sorted and then they will come out with another
season when they can”, if you’ve paid attention to similar situations, you’ll
know that most anime never recover from this.
Mostly because most anime never get beyond 2 seasons if they even get that to begin with.
Especially when the second season was produced by a different production house than the first.
Speaking of which…
So last time Log Horizon was animated by Studio Statelight.
This time however, production was handled by Studio Deen and the changes are noticeable.
The overall quality in the art didn’t take a huge hit after the swap, but it still took
one.
Most of it just looks cheaper and just less polished in general.
We see less of this expansive and immersive fantasy world, and much more muddled backgrounds
and flat characters layered overtop.
The animation itself also is done in a way that makes the lack of budget quite noticeable.
Gone are the more detailed cuts of action, and the great looking fights of the original.
I’m not saying of course that the original had AMAZING fights either, but they were indeed
better than this.
Dialogue-heavy scenes take far more precedence than they used to, but even then there’s
the occasional shot of a character that just doesn’t look quite right.
Overall, I get the look they were going for, as it appears that the changes in designs
make the characters look closer to the original material, but I was quite a fan of the aesthetic
of the original season, so all of this came off as a disappointment.
The soundtrack is another area where you could tell they tightened the budget, mostly because
there isn’t one.
Or rather, more accurate to say is that there isn’t much of a unique soundtrack to season
two.
They just continue to use all the music from season one, only adding in a few new tracks
here and there, but mostly there’s a lot of leaning on the first season’s OST.
Now on the one hand, the music from season one was really good and I liked it a lot,
but on the other hand, it was already spread out to cover the original 25 episodes, so
at this point the repetition of the same tracks and themes became grating.
However, the surprising upside to this is that they were also cheap when it came to
the series’ opening song.
Meaning they just reused Database from season one.
This may sound like a criticism, but honestly it’s a plus, because Database is freaking
awesome!
Oh yeah, and I can talk about the dub this time!
It wasn’t out when I reviewed season one!
That’s great!
Except the dub is…well, it’s not bad.
It’s passable in the way that it does indeed translate the English dialogue, but my major
concern would not be with the actors they casted, but rather some of the liberties they
took with characters personalities.
If you’ve already watched the series in sub, then the Japanese voices have particular
personalities attached to them.
Those personalities are in some cases either ignored by the dub or instead just really
amped up.
For example, Naotsugu’s more jock-like dudebro personality is far more apparent in the dub,
which I felt distracts a bit, and Nyanta in particular goes from coming off as an old-timey
British gentlemen to a calm and laid back black dude.
Yeah, they both technically fit the character, but it just causes my mental perceptions of
the characters to change and in doing so can distract from the show.
Then again, Nyanta is now more officially a Cool Cat.
Ahh Ahh?
Yeah, I’ll see myself out…not now, but later.
I have a feeling I’m going to be part of an extreme minority as far as my opinion with
this show.
I’m a large fan of the first season, and while there were many things in this new season
that I liked, the presentation of it all, the pacing, the increased padding, makes me
wonder what the point of it was.
We had a narrative stopping point, and it’s quite obvious that there wasn’t enough material
to adapt into another 25 episode series without stretching things thin, so why did they?
If they left it alone and did nothing, it would have fared far better than shows (No
Game No Life) that end in the middle of the story, and if they wanted to make another
set of episodes because they could, why not just stop it at 12 or 13?
As I said, this season is a bridge season, it’s supposed to continue where they first
left off and take us into a potential third season that hopefully would end everything
off in a nice and pleasant manner, except that we likely aren’t getting that third
season, so ultimately this is all just a bridge to nowhere.
While I enjoyed and appreciated the chance to see these characters again – to see how
they are still coping with their world and dealing with new problems – a part of me
wonders if we would have been better off not seeing it.
It’s definitely not the worst season two I’ve ever encountered, but I still feel
like my recommendation about it is similar.
As such, I would like to present Log Horizon 2 with the recommendation to Skip It.
I say this as my standard baseline suggestion as to whether you should watch it or not,
as I feel that for most people season one is enough to do you fine as far as getting
to know the story and the characters of Log Horizon.
Obviously if you get really heavily into Log Horizon and feel the need to watch this season,
then by all means do so, but I don’t feel like it is required watching.
That said, if in the future a third season does somehow magically materialize, then this
rating will get upgraded to a stream, unless that season bombs, though I’d like to be
optimistic and say it wouldn’t.
At the time of this video, Log Horizon 2 is available from Sentai Filmworks on DVD and
Blu-ray.
It is also, if you have access to it, available for streaming over on Crunchyroll in North
America.
Link in the description crunchyroll.com/glassreflection for a free trial of its premium service should
you be interested in it.
Though full disclosure, unless you live in Canada, premium is not required to watch.
For alternate anime recommendations, if you like stories about people getting sent to
fantasy worlds, particularly with gaming-like settings, then I highly recommend you check
out Konosuba, a comedy series that instead of taking a fantasy world and saying it’s
an MMO without any gaming mechanics, it takes a fantasy world and adds in MMO mechanics
without calling any of it out as such.
Second recommendation, like with the first season, goes to Spice and Wolf, which is even
more fitting of a recommendation when I say that you should probably skip its second season
as well.
It also does continue nicely from the first and for big fans can be highly enjoyable,
but unfortunately its second season even more so hints at a third season that should have
been forthcoming but never appeared.
So I’ll tell people to just leave it alone.
But the first season includes a nice focus on politics and economy, similar to this season
of Log Horizon, so if you enjoy that aspect you’ll get your…money’s worth.
Ehh?
Okay, now I’ll ACTUALLY see myself out.
And that’s it from me.
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And until next time, stay frosty!