Last time on Log Horizon, Shiroe checked out the new expansion pack of the long-lasting MMO, Elder Tales, and woke up- along with a slew of other people- physically trapped inside the game world. He meets up with his Naotsugu to see what’s up, and we get a long exposition dump on how the game works. After some extensive information gathering, Shiroe and Naotsugu test their mettle in an easy dungeon. Because of the new circumstances, battles are going to be much more high-maintenance than before. Later, they meet up with Shiroe’s friend, Akatsuki, who drinks a potion to revert back into a girl. Even more later, while practice-fighting, they end up in a real fight with PKers. Fortunately, thanks to their teamwork and experience, the jerks go down easily. Afterwards, they end up on a big guild expedition to the city of Susukino, to save a friend of a friend. When they arrive, they manage to rescue her no problem, thanks to some teamwork and an old cat guy.
This volume introduces a number of new aspects to Log Horizon‘s cast and setting. In the case of the setting, they go into a whole schpiel about the NPCs, called the People of the Earth in-game. They’re pretty much your normal isekai villagers, but I wanted to bring this point up as a comparison to Infinite Dendrogram.
So far, the NPCs in Log Horizon- despite being called perfectly human- don’t come off as such compared to Dendro‘s, even though they are the same conceptually. This is likely because the narrator of Log Horizon just tells you they are, instead of Dendro, which is setup so that both the reader and Ray are meant to be bamboozled by Liliana’s appearance, mistaking an NPC for a fellow player, and selling the point organically. But hey, Log Horizon also brings up Ancients, who are NPCs that have a bit more chutzpah to them. Hopefully the author will introduce an interesting character from that pool of ideas.
The volume also introduces the issue of the guilds. Due to the difference in strength that various players have, higher-level players are beginning to monopolize the market. For example, a powerful guild called Hamelin employs two of Shiroe’s friends, twin siblings named Minori and Touya. They, along with many other newbs, are being worked to the bone at guilds like Hamelin, and since they’re newbs, they can’t do anything about it.
Unfortunately, these twins aren’t too interesting. They have pretty typical “baggage-type-character” personalities. The annoying thing is that they had an opportunity to go to Shiroe early on, but they refused because of pride or some BS. But when Shiroe reaches out to them anyway, they are astonished at what a good guy he is, painting him as more like Kirito than what I would prefer.
But hey, at least Log Horizon is really starting to get into the nitty gritty of the actual consequences of being trapped in a game world. In SAO, it was clearly a power fantasy, with no extra thought put into how various people would behave from a psychological standpoint. But Log Horizon is definitely the most mature of the MMO-based light novels that I’ve seen.
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Verdict: 7.5/10
Log Horizon is starting to shape up. But with the uninspired cast of characters and heavy exposition, it still has too many similarities to SAO for me to understand why it’s so critically acclaimed. The next volume seems to be the start of a two-parter, so maybe that’s when it’ll take the kid gloves off.
Weeb Revues 