Read other peoples’ reviews of Log Horizon and a pattern emerges, whereby your enjoyment of the series seems predicated on your level of involvement with MMORPGs and by how much you want an anime series to capture the feelings they invoke. So on the one hand you have those who have played since the heady pioneering days of Ultima Online and Everquest and have moved past the day to day minutiae of MMO activities with an elevated focus on community and meta aspects to the experience. On the other, you have those who seek the thrill of loot, of building one’s character, min-maxing and optimising and savouring the Pavlovian new-level ping.

Log Horizon contains characters from that entire spectrum but as a series, favours the former over the latter. The concept of characters becoming trapped within an MMO is definitely not unique but its approach to telling a story within that structure is. Perhaps most crucially though is that the series seems to understand which core tenets of MMOs make a good story rather than doing the opposite trying to apply a story to an MMO.

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I have decided, perhaps foolishly, to start playing an MMO - Aion. If one were to ask the reason for me deciding this, I could not give a single answer. I can quantify my reasoning, but not give a single definitive motive.

To backtrack, I don't usually play MMO's: I haven't played one extensively since Ultima Online back when 28.8 modems were considered cutting edge. I have dabbled only once since, joining the first iteration of Guild Wars, an NCSoft cost-to-buy but free-to-play system that was bought for playing with my significant other of the time; suffice to say neither of us took to it and that experiment ended with a little fanfare. I did hear of Aion when it was released in Korea at the tail end of 2008, although at the time it blended in with the general background noise of the Korean gaming scene of which MMO's play a large part.

I think one of the aspects which swayed me into at least trying Aion was the aesthetics. Despite my ordinary avoidance of superficiality, I am by nature drawn to pretty things, a severe character flaw I'm sure. So it had crested the first hurdle in getting my attention. The second draw was the pleasant buzz surrounding it, anime and game blogs alike weren't exactly haemorrhaging praise but there was a decent undercurrent to the otherwise acerbic MMO discussion. Partnered with the looks came the lore, typical high-fantasy fare with a generous sprinkling of ethereal names that only just manages to be convincing of when it was conceived: moments before it was decided to be an MMO. And then there was the marketing:

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