If you ever wanted to watch a show that would make you want to run back to Sword Art Online with your tail between your legs, try sitting down with its genre sibling Overlord. This is MMORPG anime done horribly wrong, and that's saying a lot, because the theme doesn't tend to produce good shows. The first episode starts bad, with a boring narrator talking over a minute-long still frame of a game logo, and it's only downhill from there. There is effectively one character, and all the exposition in the first episode is him talking to himself, which is a cheap tactic at best and incredibly wearying when you're subjected to twenty minutes of it. Between spurts of this we're treated to a bevy of cookie cutter moe NPC designs, rendered unflatteringly in Overlord's purposefully mediocre animation style. Nothing looks good or sounds good. The whole thing was so ho-hum that the treatment of Albedo, the show's confused succubus-raven-spider-goat chimera, almost didn't bother me. (Almost. It's... bad.)
I get that shows like Overlord and Sword Art Online are designed to cash in on gamer nerds' weakness for perceived inside jokes. Like, that's a thing, right? We gamers sit in our rooms, playing our games, dead certain that we have unique experiences that normies wouldn't relate to, wishing someone would understand us—or maybe not, because our underdog weirdo subculture celebrates being misunderstood. Nevertheless, we trade in references. Our social capital is cannibalistic and incestuous. We love jokes and memes that delineate in- and out-groups, and we love being in the in-group. We latch onto anything and everything that fits our self-narrative of being cool misunderstood nerds. Was that a joke about collecting useless quest items? I collect useless quest items, but most people don't play real games like I do, so this joke is for me. You know how it goes.
The thing is, when Overlord makes these references about calling game masters or logging out in order to not lose sleep, it's not really throwing gamers bones. This is a crafted1 multimedia experience designed to do what most anime is designed to do: make money. Gamers have become a reliable target demographic, and their predictable predilection for these references is simply a site where two things occur: one, some rich people get richer by making money off the popularity of their show; two, the gamer's identification as a gamer deepens.
The cheap production and impersonality of the whole affair only serve to insult the discerning viewer.
Recommend: No.