Overlord Review: MMO Player paradise

Overlord is a 13 episode anime series based on a MMO player in a Virtual Reality world. Superficially like Sword Art Online, the series takes a radically different direction with its plot and evolves into something all its own. The show is mainly comedic though it does have its serious moments. We follow a player named Ainz who plays as a Lich and who is now trapped inside a VR MMO RPG turned inexplicably real. The series is based on a web comic manga and the first season consists of the first two arcs of that manga.

On the last day of the popular VR MMO Yggdrasil, Momonga (whose real name is never revealed) logs in to enjoy his virtual accomplishments for one last time. Momonga is a lich magic caster and leader of the elite raiding guild Ainz Ooal Gown. He has an empty and boring real life and all his friends are known to each other purely within the game. Sadly, most of them have stopped playing due to real life concerns and not many log in to say farewell.

As the servers shut down Momonga discovers to his surprise that the game is still running and now he can't log out. Also his NPC (non player character) companions are acting like sentient beings and interacting with him as if he had always ruled them. Essentially due to some event not explained, the video game has become real. Initially baffled Momonga goes with the flow and just starts to enjoy himself since he was happier in the game than he ever was in real life.

It is quickly revealed that Momonga and all his NPCs have been transferred to some new world where they know nothing of the people or culture. No one except Momonga is aware that they come from a game and it's unclear what's happening. The series doesn't make plain if the game has come to life or Momonga has gone mad or if this is some other dimension. Momonga now lives in a game and he goes with it. He changes his name to Ainz Ooal Gown to honor his former comrades. He then begins to explore (and conqueror) the new world while attempting to avoid attention. He's not sure if he's the only "real person" in this world and he attempts to avoid gaining too much attention from any potential adversaries until he learns more about his new circumstances.

The show is mostly a gamer power fantasy, particularly a male one. Ainz has two female NPCs openly contending for his 'affection' in addition to a large group of 'battle maids' who also are willing to serve as something of a harem. Ainz rules over a massive raid dungeon called the Tomb of Nazarick and his NPCs openly worship him as a God.

Lord Ainz is almost an interesting character. The show plays with the idea of having a lawful evil/lawful neutral character as a protagonist. However the show for the most part shys away from showing dark scenes that might have been controversial. Most of the people Ainz kills he has good reason to kill.

One example is the psychotic sword woman Clementine who tortures and murders a few NPCs who join him on a single quest. Ainz tells her he felt no attachment to them and was simply using them as tools. Clementine kidnaps a young boy named Nfirea and Ainz requires his grandmother to sell themselves both into slavery in his service before he will rescue the boy.

Let's reiterate that: He extorts everything, explicitly everything, from an old grandmother as payment for him to rescue his former former employer (her grandson) from Clementine. However his brutal execution of Clementine is so completely justified that the show doesn’t really explore the depths of Ainz's morality. Clementine tortures and murders his companions on that quest before abducting Nfirea but Ainz makes it clear he didn't care about those people and was simply using them as a means to an end. He informs Clementine he's going to kill her purely because she's caused him a setback.

He toys with Clementine for a while then literally crushes her to death with her own two hands. It's a brutal death even for a serial killer but audience still isn't sure how to feel about what they're seeing because the story is so clumsy about world building and establishing stakes.

Another person Ainz kills is a nameless NPC adventurer from his new guild who is never shown to do anything malevolent to anyone. Ainz murders him purely to keep him out of his way and his mouth shut. This action and what it means for the character is not focused on. We're not even sure why he elected to kill him rather than a dozen other options which could have been considered.

Ainz character is contradictory and I’m not certain if that’s on purpose or not. When he does things publicly he always insists on payment and can be downright cruel in his stingy bargaining. However when encountering someone privately he’s often exceedingly generous and kind. Because Ainz speaks in two different voices we’re left uncertain who Ainz actually is. Is he the brooding powerful lich or the insecure and lonely human player? Or are they merging together? Is one his public persona and the other private? Does the player act evil because he feels he has to and regrets it? Or does the player not really care because all the characters are just data?

The whole “stuck in a video game” trope has severe flaws to it in this series. It’s an easy way of having complex rules since you can justify any spur of the moment silliness by referencing some previously undisclosed game rule. However unlike SAO which at least had the protagonist interact with other humans, all the characters in the show except Ainz are NPCs. This means the audience isn't sure if it's supposed to care about what happens to them or what Ainz does to them.

That’s a serious problem with any story that’s attempting to explore the dark side. It’s really hard to give Ainz a serious moment where we feel his turn toward evil or at least his brutal expediency if fundamentally the people he’s screwing over aren’t real. The show makes this an open question, never explaining if the characters have suddenly gained sentience or if he’s been somehow transported to an alternate dimension, but the show never makes what's going on clear.

This is a bad question to leave unanswered. It's actually a serious problem because it makes Ainz’s character development completely irrelevant to the story. Humans slaughter NPCs in games all the time. That’s what most RPG game play is. Players get bored and go on murderous killing sprees in RPGs just out of boredom. No act of cruelty toward an imaginary character says much about the game player except that they have too much time on their hands. Consequentially if these people really are just NPCs it’s actually remarkable how much Ainz DOES care if they live or die.

In one episode Ainz considers resurrecting a large number of slain civilians with a healing item he has after rescuing a town from marauders and introducing himself as their protector. He declines to resurrect them, even though it is trivial for him to do so, because he doesn’t want to attract too much attention to himself.

On the one hand if we are supposed to view these NPCs as people that decision is meaningful to the character. He’s showing us how selfish he can be. Some of these people are the parents of two small children who he personally interacted with, and showing his indifference to their pain tells us what kind of character Ainz is.

On the other hand, if these are NPCs and thus imaginary, why do we care that he didn’t do it? Nothing we see is real or has meaning. Sword Art Online kept the threat and meaning of its scenes close by making all characters we interact with simulations of real humans. If the avatar dies, the player dies. There are real consequences to what happens. But if someone not in the main cast gets killed, am I supposed to care? Do they exist?

Ainz is supposed to be human. Can he die? If he does will he just respawn or will he die in the real world? Would he just wake up? The fact that we don’t have answers to these questions nor any creditable hint, the story lacks stakes.

Ainz is actually two characters: the evil archlich character who speaks in a bombastic voice. He actually sounds pretty cool. The other is the voice of the player himself who is trapped in the game and seems to have a completely different personality. The player is clearly uncomfortable in this world and is acting to preserve his image of a powerful ruthless being for the benefit of the NPCs' whose loyalty he is still not certain of.

The character frequently talks a big game but doesn’t deliver on it. He does have one glory moment at the end of season 1. He fights a mind controlled NPC character named Shalltear who has been brainwashed to kill him. For a few scenes this fight does actually get awesome before crashing to earth hard. The fight features the archlich Ainz outsmarting his foe by taking off all his max tier wizard items and equipping max tier warrior equipment instead.

In this game universe, the equipment is shown as rags on his character since he doesn’t have the class qualifications to actually equip it and can’t use it to full effect or display it. This is actually similar to how a variety of RPGs handle incompatible equipment.

He then buffs himself with a holy damage reduction spell. During the fight, Ainz goads his foe into exhausting her special abilities and spells as she goes for the kill. With his foe nearly exhausted, Ainz uses his own special abilities to inflict Sudden Death status effect on her but then she auto-resurrects due to an item in her inventory with full health and no mana facing a highly weakened Ainz with his mana exhausted.

The first part of the duel where the two characters just fling lots of spells back and forth at each other is terribly boring because it’s really just filler. Unless the character has a clearly delineated list of powers so that I approximately know what he can do, or at least a health gauge so I can see whose wining and whose losing, this kind of fight is boring because the story isn’t working toward any kind of climax or resolution. How do these spells change the strategic situation? If the answer is, they don’t, then they belong on the cutting room floor.

After Shalltear resurrects herself and is confident of her victory, Ainz then has a legitimately cool speech where he explains how he tricked Shalltear into wasting all her cooldown abilities and mana. He then casts his last spell: Perfect warrior.

This lets him temporarily change his class to warrior and now has all the benefits of his max level warrior equipment fighting an opponent with no mana. Despite the fact that we in no way knew this was possible going into fight, it’s actually a pretty cool idea strategically. Ainz starts to kick Shalltear’s butt and it’s awesome because the character worked for it. The spell he cast wasn’t just an instant “I win” button, he has to scheme and maneuver for it using some pretty innovative strategy.

However shortly thereafter, the fight gets stupid again because Ainz starts literally cheating. He starts using game Cash items. That’s literally what they’re called. The show itself admits that its hero just bought himself a victory. The fight is impossible to take seriously at this point. The show is imitating some aspects of gamer culture but clearly not the ones it thinks it is. After a brief moment of awesome the show collapses into irrelevance again.

The first season was actually pretty decent and I enjoyed it despite its clear flaws. Much more than Sword Art Online, Overlord is an interesting take on RPGs and MMO culture. A new season is due out in January and I'm looking forward to it.

Final Score:

7/10