Overlord S03E12 Review: Iä! Shub-Niggurath!

Overlord, Season 3, Episode 12: Massacre

This is definitely meant to be a "huge event" chapter, and it's... it's a bit underwhelming? And sadly, I think part of it is due to the usage of sub-par CGI. I really don't want to be that guy that only complains about visuals -- lord knows I've made my case for how visuals tend to just be a way to enhance a story as opposed to being the main selling point, but here, the "Dark Young" ends up being... underwhelming. The actual CGI models are actually not bad, mind you -- we've seen glimpses of these tentacled toothy mouths in the opening since the beginning of the third season, and using CGI for eldritch Lovecraftian beings is definitely a far more sensible decision -- CGI monsters in Overlord works best when they are explicitly meant to be inhuman, like the Death Knights or the angels from the first season. And as such, portraying the Dark Young via CGI is definitely a move I don't mind, and actually support. (The Light Novel's version of the Dark Young, though, are so much cooler, but I also concur that they would be insanely difficult to animate)

But the way that they move around ends up being so, so static that it's clear that the CGI team has trouble animating this thing beyond just "writhing around" and "awkwardly shuffling", which honestly kind of kills a lot of what could probably be a far, far more horrific and impressive scene. And since this seems to be THE big moment of this season, equivalent to the Ainz/Shalltear battle in the first season and the whole battle-in-the-capital in the second, it's definitely more than a bit disappointing. I don't think it's straight-up bad, since it still got the point of the scene across, but it just could've been so much better, is all I'm saying.

Also, did the random soldiers needed to be CGI? Like the goblins from the previous episode, they just genuinely felt stiff and unnatural.

We get a brief glimpse of the mentality of Emperor Jircniv talking to his advisers about how he's going to use this Kingdom/Empire war to hype up Ainz as this horrifyingly powerful being that the rest of humanity is going to have to band against, and it's... it's honestly not a bad move from him if his ultimate goal is indeed to unite humanity against Ainz. But, as always, people underestimate Ainz, and what Jircniv suspected Ainz could easily do (comparing him to Mare's destruction of the Empire's courtyard), Jircniv noted that Ainz will probably kill around 3000 people with his opening spell, which will definitely rank him among as a powerhouse.

We also get very brief hints about the Evil Gods and the Thirteen Heroes being compared to Ainz once more, and honestly, at this point it's pretty clear that these guys are also Yggdrasil people that got transported to the New World, aren't they? I recently went back and watched the opening montage of people talking at the beginning of the second season, and, yeah, the conversation that the dragon lord has with the old woman certainly makes a whole lot of sense if you consider it that way.

And then, well, we cut to the actual battle between Re-Estize and Baharuth, as a masked Ainz and his Death Knight regiment troop down the middle of the Empire's forces, we get King Rampossa's nobles telling him how they outnumber the Empire four to one and how it's going to be a massacre... and we get to see Gazef and Marquis Raeven, the only people who seem to be taking this whole thing remotely seriously. Gazef is adorned in the "four treasures of the kingdom", four powerful magical items, including the all-cutting blade Razoredge. Yeah, that's not going to do jack shit against Ainz, huh? Gazef is definitely an interesting character, being someone who's friends with Ainz, but is loyal to a country that's actively fighting Ainz, and it's going to be the big emotional linchpin of this arc, it seems.

Also, we get a very nice bit from Raeven who notes that how he would've condemned the king for sending Prince Barbro to relative safety (oh, if the king only knew), but as a father himself, he now sympathizes with the king.

And then Ainz shows up and takes his time casting his spell with like thirteen magic circles, and Raeven and Gazef immediately decide that this isn't an enemy that they can fight, and it's time to "run like fucking rabbits". Meanwhile, though, Ainz is just making an opportunity of taking his time casting the super-tier spell just to draw out any Yggdrasil players that may be observing, putting himself as a decoy -- so, yeah, despite being involved in all of this, Ainz's main goal is still drawing out other Yggdrasil players, and it's genuinely interesting when/if he actually encounters one.

Also, continuing the whole "where's my soul" theme from the first season -- something that the show is admittedly inconsistent at portraying -- Ainz notes how he doesn't feel a god damned thing for the imminent massacre.

And the spell that Ainz utilizes is called "Tribute to Dark Ferility: Iä Shub-Niggurath!", which is just such an insanely unexpected thing for him to say. Shub-Niggurathi s a character in the Lovecraftian  horror series,  the series that epitomizes the 'eldritch abomination incomprehensible to mankind' trope, and the source of Cthulhu. Shub-Niggurath there is known as the "Black Goat of the Woods With A Thousand Young", which informs the goat feet and the baa-baa sounds of the Dark Young. And their names. It's always pretty impressive whenever something relatively obscure gets referenced in a Japanese anime, for sure.

And the spell activates, and an entire wing comprising one-third of the Empire's army just straight-up drops dead, some 70 thousand people, and everyone on both sides of the battlefield is horrified, including poor poor Nimble, Jircniv's second-in-command assigned to escort Ainz or something. And as Nimble praises Ainz for his mighty spell (while trying hard not to piss himself), Ainz drops the bombshell, that all of those people dying isn't even the spell, and that was merely the tribute -- the bodies are all consumed into a giant black orb, and summons the Dark Young, Ainz's "adorable little children".

And that is when the dark CGI blobs of writhing mouths, shadowy tentacles and goat feet are formed, and for all my complaints about them at the beginning of this review, the Dark Young actually looks okay when they are just being formed and writhing around and giving out goat bleats (a very unexpected yet pretty dang interestingly unsettling choice). And Ainz yells to "let the despair begin", and... and the Dark Young just massacre everyone. It's just a shame, again, that the animation doesn't quite live up to the awesome-horror of the scene other than the scene where Raeven and his group of ex-adventurers are running away -- every other scene with the Dark Young just kind of felt pretty sub-par.

Ainz, meanwhile, isn't actually horrified in the slightest, and actually feels giddy, like someone getting an achievement in a video game -- because apparently no one was able to summon five Dark Young back in Yggdrassil, and I do love how adorable Mare is in just going "yay congratulations". Oh, and Ainz takes off his mask and gloves,  and reveals his true nature as an undead to the world, which is a pretty goddamn awesome moment, if nothing else, considering how a good chunk of the first three seasons involves Ainz's explicit orders for Nazarick to hide their true nature from the world. The scene where he forces the Baharuth Empire to applaud his massacre, as well as how scared-shitless the Empire's troops, his supposed allies, were, when Ainz calls one of the Dark Young to his side to serve as a mount, are all well-executed scenes.

Ainz gives the stipulation that there are four people that the Dark Young are not allowed to kill (one of them is explicitly confirmed to be Gazef here), and I'm curious who else is on Ainz's safe list. Considering how Climb was implied to be 'safe' in season two by Demiurge's orders, he's an easy candidate for another one on the list. The other two, though?

Marquis Raeven might be the third one, because he's one of the few to survive the massacre, and the scene where the gigantic Dark Young looms over him and his party is pretty effective. RIP Raeven's adventurer buddies, though, because I'm sure they're all dead. They were minor characters I remember from season two... one of them is called Lockemeyer or something, and helped Climb beat up Succulent, eh? He's dead now.

Meanwhile, to buy time for the king to escape, Gazef, Climb, Brain and everyone else decide to be decoys for the king to escape, and it's basically the big tense part of this arc -- how many of the people we care about are going to survive? Gazef utilizes his magical items and his martial arts to try and detect the Dark Young's weak point and tries by himself to at least slow down one of the five, but all of Gazef's skills doesn't put a dent on it, and poor Gazef just gets sent flying with a flick of the Dark Young's tentacles.


And the final scene ends up being Gazef facing off against Ainz, who was scouring the battlefield looking for Gazef. Gazef stands his ground and the exchange between him and Ainz is a lot less hostile than I expected. Ainz basically asks Gazef to become his subordinate, with the promise that he can easily stop the Dark Young from killing everyone else should Gazef do so... but Gazef ends up choosing his honour and his king, and asks a duel from Ainz. Ainz's argument, though, that Gazef is willing to let his 'honour' cause the deaths of so many others, is in conflict with his stated intention of protecting the Kingdom, is... interesting. Is Gazef's honourable-but-ultimately-foolish choice to stand up against Ainz the wrong thing to do, or is it the just, last stand of a good man in the face of overwhelming evil power? It's honestly a pretty interesting dilemma offered by Ainz, but sadly, poor Gazef honestly feels so sidelined this entire season, and I don't think we really spend enough time with him or his conflict (and that's not even throwing in his quasi-friendship with Ainz from the first arc of the story) to really feel satisfied with it. Next episode is going to be Gazef-vs-Ainz, and there's no way that's not going to be a curb-stomp. We'll see how things end up being in the next episode.