Overlord S01E06 Review: Find A Party

Overlord, Season 1, Episode 6: Journey

The episode honestly plays off as basically a typical fantasy RPG 'gather your party' moment, with Nfirea and the genuinely identikit quartet of adventurers (the only one who has any sort of distinguishing personality is the blonde archer that keeps hitting on Nabe) delivering a fair bit of generic world-building talk as they escor Nfirea to gather herb ingredients, with Ainz using his cover story as an outsider from another ccountry to ask about the magic and technological levels of this world, which is a pretty fun bit.

The group is then attacked by a small horde of goblins and ogres, which the adventurer buddies attack... but then Ainz and Nabe walks in, and show off their full power, quite literally ripping the gigantic ogres apart. It's interesting that Ainz is actually being impressive as a swordsman/warrior type battler, when the audience know that Ainz is severely handicapping himself since he's actually a magician. The goblins and ogres are depicted in the same sort of quasi-CGI as the death knight earlier, which I thought really worked to make them feel a fair bit more inhuman.

Some really fun action scenes and magic spell-calling, which I really do like, and I do like just how surprised Ainz is that they actually have to manually harvest the ogre corpses' ears to bring back the proofs of their kills, and "treasures and crystals" don't just drop out of the monsters. This is D&D, not WoW, fool!

The bulk of the episode is the ogre battle,  followed by the group  sitting around in a campfire talking about the battle they participated that day. I found it kind of hilarious that Ainz (who can't eat) shrugging off the soup with an excuse about how it's rude in his religion to eat after taking another being's life. The Adventurers give a pretty sstandard NPC-backstory bit where they named their guild the "Swords of Darkness" after the legendary sword of the Thirteen Heroes, another typical backstory-group-of-fallen-ancient-heroes in an RPG setting.

This causes Momonga/Ainz to get very melancholic, remembering his own disbanded guild with its players having diverged to different parts of life, remembering that once he was enthusiastic about his own game just like this. Man, it's a genuinely pretty well-done scene and one that kind of strikes true to me as well, who has moved away from many video game and tabletop RPG communities I've been part of in the past. And while Momonga is in full introspective melancholy bit, Nfirea ends up interrogating the other adventurers about this mysterious Momon fellow, with the excuse of wanting to impress a girl or something? He does seem harmless and more inquisitive than harmful, but I dunno.

Meanwhile, on the side of the Cult of The Ominous Necromancers, Clementine has been going around looking for information and killing information brokers in her way, killing them and dragging their bodies for Khajit Dale ("I don't go by Dale anymore") to reanimate as a group of undead. We get to see that Clementine is super-crazy, straight-up attempting to attack Khajit at one point during their conversation, and would've stabbed him if not for a huge wall of bones that Khajit summons, and they get ready to unleash something called the Spiral of Death to utterly crush the city of Erantel. Ominous! ...if we don't already know that Ainz is probably like so much higher in power level compared to these two schmucks. Honestly, part of why there's tension is that what Ainz/Momonga is going to do is still kind of unknown and the main character himself is sort of a wild card in an otherwise standard fantasy setting. Good stuff, honestly, and while quite slow-paced and exposition heavy, I actually am enjoying myself watching Overlord more than I thought I would.

Oh, and I didn't have a chance to say this anywhere in the review, but apparently while Ainz is away, the Guardians are partying. Well, Albedo, anyway, as a very nonplussed Demiurge finds her cuddling inside Ainz's bed ("he's a skeleton, he's not going to use it") with a goddamn full-body pillow of Ainz. How... how did she get that?