Posts with the “maoyuu maou yuusha” tag

System administrator

A review of the first Log Horizon series

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.

that knowing sense of daftness when a samurai takes down a boar ten times his size, or when a griffin tries to eat Naotsugu’s head

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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Bountiful

A review of the Maoyuu Maou Yuusha anime series

Maoyuu Maou Yuusha (Demon King and the Hero) was nothing like what I expected. My ill-advised method of choosing anime to watch based on animated GIFs that I find on Tumblr led me to believe it was going to be just another medieval fan-service series; sharpen claws, commence slating. How wrong I was. I had seen the first episode when the series first aired and didn’t continue watching for some unknown fickle reason but frequently heard it compared to Spice and Wolf. In that series, wolf spirit Holo wanders around naked for a not insignificant amount of time which is likely where I assumed the comparison came from.

“I’m here to kill you!” “You want some tea?” “...” “...” “Sure”

In actuality it’s from the pointed approach to medieval affairs than chest out fan-service; so whereas Spice and Wolf busies itself with the minutiae of trade economics, Maoyuu Maou Yuusha goes for a more nuts-and-bolts cultural approach, dragging in some good old fashion politicking to go with it. You have the Demon King, the red haired poster child of the series, who makes a deal with the Hero, Generic McBlandpants, to set aside their racial and ideological differences in order to build a better world.

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