Review for Overlord Season 1 Collection - Collector's Edition

Introduction

I really shouldn’t have been disappointed. After all, the trapped in a MMORPG genre is a popular one in anime, with shows like Sword Art Online, Accel World, Log Horizon, No Game, No Life, and .hack mainstays of the anime schedules. What’s one more such show? But for the life of me, I was idiotically expecting a gripping anime drama about the 1944 invasion of Normandy. What was I thinking?


In the mid 22nd Century, the Dive Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games have a great popularity, literally immersing players in fantastic worlds. After 12 years, the Ygdrassil game is coming to an end, its servers being shut down. For one player, Momonga, it’s the end of an era. It’s a game that he and his teammates have excelled at, have in some ways defined, and unwilling to say goodbye, Momonga decides to stay logged in until after the servers are switched off. The last of his teammates log out and all that’s left in the castle that they created is Momonga, and the non-player characters that he and his team programmed. He has one last goof, reprogramming the ‘bitchy’ Albedo character to instead love him unconditionally, and then waits.


The hour comes and passes, and the world still exists. Only it has changed. No longer can Momonga access the ‘game’, and suddenly the NPC characters have personalities, are acting of their own volition. Momonga’s trapped in Ygdrassil, albeit lord of all he surveys. Only he’s not in Ygdrassil anymore. The castle has changed location, it’s in another world altogether, with a whole bunch of other people, and there’s Momonga with godlike powers. What’s a god to do?


13 episodes are presented across 2 Blu-rays from Funimation, available as a Collector’s Edition, a Standard Edition, and the show is also available on DVD.

Disc 1
1. End and Beginning
2. Floor Guardians
3. Battle of Carne Village
4. Ruler of Death
5. Two Venturers
6. Journey
7. Wise King of Forest
8. Twin Swords of Slashing Death
9. The Dark Warrior

Disc 2
10. True Vampire
11. Confusion and Understanding
12. The Bloody Valkyrie
13. Player vs. Non Player Character

Picture

Overlord gets a 1.78:1 widescreen 1080p transfer on these discs. The image is clear and sharp throughout, with strong, consistent colours, no visible artefacts or aliasing, and just the minimal of digital banding. I should assign that sentence to an F-key or something, so often that I type it. But the consistency of HD transfers is one thing, the quality of the original animation is another, and coming from studio Madhouse, you’d expect Overlord to be something memorable. Instead, it’s really just... good. The character designs are nice and memorable, especially the main cast, while the world design is suitably fantasy oriented. The animation too is robust, characters staying on model, and the appropriate flourishes applied to action sequences and bursts of magic. Maybe I’m getting spoiled, but Overlord doesn’t really stand out as anything special.

Sound

Overlord gets the usual Dolby TrueHD 5.1 English and 2.0 Japanese from Funimation, with subtitles and signs locked to the appropriate track. I have to admit that the autotune heavy opening theme was not a draw to the show for me, but other than that, the Japanese audio is fine, characters cast appropriately for their stereotypes, and the performances working well in terms of the story. I gave the dub a try, and I can confirm that it exists, but I didn’t sample enough to develop an opinion. The subtitles are timed accurately and are free of typos.

Extras

The discs present their content with animated menus

Disc 1 autoplays with a trailer for the awesome Ergo Proxy.

There are two commentaries on this disc, the first for episode 2 features ADR Director Kyle Phillips, Jeff Johnson (Demiurge), Megan Shipman (Mare), and Jill Harris (Aura). The second on episode 9 sees Kyle Phillips again, this time with writer Josh Grelle, Anastasia Munoz (Nabe), and Mikaela Krantz (Clementine).


Disc 2 autoplays with a trailer for Drifters.

There is a video commentary for episode 13 with Kyle Phillips, Felecia Angelle (Shalltear), Christopher Guerrero (Ains/Momonga) and Elizabeth Maxwell (Albedo)

There are 24:16 of Play Play Pleiades comedy shorts with SD versions of the characters, if you like that sort of thing.


You get almost 10 minutes worth of previews for the episodes, some five minutes worth of promotional videos, the textless credits (with subtitles locked on), and trailers for the Attack on Titan movies, Summer Wars, Psychic School Wars, Escaflowne, Harmony, and the Psycho Pass Movie.

I haven’t seen the packaging or the physical extras that come with the Limited Edition to comment.

Conclusion

There’s a book I recall reading back in the 1980s, God Game by Andrew Greeley, which thirty years ago did a better job of dealing with this kind of story than Overlord just did. Given that 30 years ago, VR was a pipe dream, RPGs had to exist without the MMO given the state of the Internet back then, and the state of the art in home computing would have been an 8-bit machine, probably with a 5 inch floppy drive, that’s saying something. I don’t know what the aim of Overlord is, but from my perspective, it failed to hit any of the targets that might have interested me.


The ‘trapped in a virtual world’ is practically a genre in itself, but what makes Overlord different is the strength and ability of its protagonist. We never learn who he is in the real world, but Momonga and his online friends had practically clocked the Ygdrassil game, raised to godlike powers by the time the game had come to its end, certainly outclassing any NPCs in the game. So when the servers are shut down, and Momonga finds that he’s still in a virtual world, his guild’s castle transferred to another realm, it quickly becomes clear that he’s the strongest one there.


There are changes in this new world. The NPCs that the members of his guild had created are now sentient, and independent, albeit still loyal to him, and quite naturally they become characters in the show of significant personality. The same is true for all the other characters that they encounter in this new world, assumed to be NPCs but behaving with intelligence and emotion beyond that of a simple AI. With his ability to affect the world directly, his access to any sort of interface taken from him, Momonga has to face this world as if it was real, which is the usual story tack that shows like Log Horizon take.


The problem with the show is the god-like powers. Momonga soon decides to take over the world, although he begins by doing a little recon, adopting the persona of a warrior and trying to learn about his new domain. He changes his name to that of his guild, Ains Ooal Gown, and sets forth about his self-appointed mission. And whatever challenge he faces, whatever threat arises, he deals with it all with ease because he’s so overpowered. Everyone that he encounters has a jaw dropping moment at his plethora of god-level magical items, his ability to wield 8th Tier magic, and so on and so forth. There’s absolutely no drama in the show, no sense that the protagonist might be in peril. It’s a problem that the show acknowledges, and tries to deal with by having one of his minions mind-controlled and turned against him. But once again, he pulls out the god-level abilities trump card, wipes out the foe, and even resurrects her with the mind-control lifted.


The God Game novel that I mentioned dealt with this quandary by making its protagonist emotionally invested in the characters in the game, by having him tormented by the unexpected consequences of the godlike power that he wielded, the decisions that he took. Overlord even ignores this possibility of engaging the viewers’ empathy with Momonga/Ains by having the ‘game’ act to diminish and contain his emotions, so when he wipes out a load of NPCs to create an undead army, he has no feelings about it. It’s no surprise that a viewer would be just as uninterested in the show.


The sad thing is that Overlord is a really well put together show. The story ticks along at a decent pace, is structured well, and the character interactions are entertaining and well written. Also, there’s an ongoing mystery as to the nature of this world, the gradually dawning realisation that Momonga/Ains may not be the sole god-like figure there, and that possibly other players of Ygdrassil may have been trapped in this new world. None of that actually goes anywhere in these thirteen episodes; it’s all setting up a potential second season, one that has been given a green light for production in Japan. But the fundamental issues with the premise and the protagonist of the story make it a sequel that I’m not too keen to watch.