Overlord S01E01 Review: MMORPG

Overlord, Season 1, Episode 1: End & Beginning

I'm not sure how regular this is going to be, since my reviews of older anime tended to be a bit less popular on this site. It's what I've been watching, though, and the first season of Overlord is a 2015 anime based on a series of light novel. This first episode is pretty... interesting? The concept of Overlord is not the most creative, I guess, but the utilization of video game tropes is certainly an interesting one.

The third season of Overlord is about halfway through, and it's been hyped up and I've heard a lot of great things about this series, so I'm going to check it out. Again, though, I'm not 100% sure how quickly I'm going to get through these episods

See, the year is 2126 and video games have apparently evolved so much that MMORPG's are super duper immersive, allowing people to straight-up experience the world by entering avatars of their characters, Sword Art Online/Ready Player One style, and I do like how they still have like computer screen video game selection panels to click on. And one such game is a game called Yggdrasil, which is shutting down after twelve years. Apparently it's a game that has such amounts of customization and generally borderline-unrealistic freedom of gameplay (as in most video games in fiction) that allows the members of the guild to construct a unique superpowerful weapon, create customized NPC's that essentially serve as raid bosses to their guild hall, et cetera.

And our main hero is Momonga, whose avatar is the undead skeleton lord Ainz, and is a master of one of the greatest guilds in the game, Ainz Ooal Gown (I had to look it up -- not an easy name to remember), which is comprised exclusively of players with way too much free time on their hands as well as having non-humanoid avatars. Thing is, though, like most MMORPG's, most of Momonga's buddies have sort of moved on to do real life stuff, and even when Momonga wants to have all of his members gather around one last time as the servers to Yggdrasil shut down, only one very tired slime-man, Herohero, shows up, and even then only for a short conversation.

Momonga spends his last time just walking around, dicking around with the seldom-used NPCs guarding their guild hall, and mucks around with the settings of one of the highest-ranking NPC's, a devil-woman called Albedo, and changes her personality lines from "bitch" to "loves Momonga". And as he walks around and takes a brief nap, of course, since this is amine-world, he finds himself in the world of the game, with all the NPC's being alive, and that he can actually sense things like Albedo's smell*, see the NPC's lips move, and 'sense' things like his mana levels, spell abilities, et cetera. After a brief bit of perverted bit where he 'experiments' with touching Albedo, who, of course, is in full-on lust-monster mode with him.


*More importantly, how does a skeleton-man even be able to smell? He doesn't even have a nose!

And... and while part of me was definitely somewhat turned off by the classic harem-manga setup, apparently the horny-superhot-lady is just a running joke, and that the series won't get quite as ecchi as some other anime/manga series I could name? We'll see.

Momonga/Ainz basically spends a good chunk of this episode just exploring the world and taking stock of his 'minions', the generals guarding his base, the Tomb of Nazarick, as well as basically establishing that, no, he can't use "Message" to summon the game-masters or his friends, just messaging the butler Sebas. Other than Albedo and Sebas, this episode introduces a duo of kid elves, Aura and Mare, who are kinda typical cheery anime kids, as well as at least three other guardians -- proper lady Shalltear, spectacles smart-looking dude Demiurge and giant four-armed golem-esque monster Cocytus. Momonga basically shrugs off the fact that he has to return to the real world (he has nothing there) and basically wants to take measure of just how different this fantasy world is from the game world he knows.

Also, you know what? I don't usually comment on music, but god damn, that metal opening and ending song's pretty damn pleasant, huh? I think I've listened to both like five times now.