Log Horizon: Nishikaze no Ryodan
Log Horizon: The West Wind Brigade

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A spin off of Log Horizon. This manga take us to re-view the world of Elder’s Tale from 'the fun and adventurous yet very strong and deep' West Wind Brigade’s angle.

Story : 8/10

In this manga, we are spared with overly complicated politics and tactics, like what Shiroe usually does. Here, it’s full of adventure, comedy, drama and fantasy life ~ all in harem style *cough*. The story itself mainly focuses at Souji as the MC, but at times the focus changes to one of the harem girls.

This manga’s stories are all related to the main storyline, which can make us see the dots and their ... connections here and there. If the main storyline of LH let the reader to see how the world spins, this manga let the reader to experience it deeper in a more fun way, from the sideline.

This manga also shows many events that occured in Akiba, with a deeper manner. For instance, light spoilers, actually the root of PKs phenomena - that went crazy before the forming of Round Table Council and stressed many adventurers including Shiroe – was Souji.
It was also the same with the existence of Hamelin, a guild which kidnapped Minori and Tohya.
Another example, in this manga, we are shown the reason why Nureha seemed to make a problematic face when Shiroe told her to go to Souji for ‘charming people’ matter, in the end part of the light novel volume 5. Yeah, there’s a connection between Souji and Nureha, which only shown in this manga.
These events aren’t shown in the light novel and the anime of Log Horizon. I ship Souji and Nureha btw ~

Art : 8/10

The art is quite detailed and refined. Not as detailed as Kaoru Mori’s work (Emma/Otoyomegari), but it’s detailed enough to be enjoyable. We can see little, detailed things here and there. The refined and fluidity of character expressions are, in my opinion, make this manga’s art quite a top-notch.

Character : 8/10

This manga has quite a lot of characters, especially in the West Wind Brigade, that are fleshed out pretty well-done. The characters are fleshed out by strongly showing their internal emotions and emphasized at how they behave, which make the characterization itself goes very smoothly. From one character to another, there’s always a theme and time for them. And that lead us to character developments, which i can only say that the developments are pretty good ~

Enjoyment 9/10

I pretty much like LH series, Nishikaze no Ryodan is definitely my favorite among them. It’s pretty fun to read – at times, it gets serious and heavy, other times, it gets pretty hillarious. The feels, the plot, the characterization, etc – are pretty well done which allow me personally able to enjoy it.

If the main LH storyline is the essential rice, then this manga is the fried chicken and sauce that help people to enjoy LH series better overall.

tl;dr: A spin-off with another perspective on a great story, but one that doesn’t really add much to it.

Log Horizon is a light novel series about a group of players of the MMORPG Elder's Tale that mysteriously wake up in the world of the game as their avatars with no way to return. This manga is a spin off of Log Horizon that focuses on Soujirou and his guild, The West Wing Brigade, a guild that’s often referred to as a harem guild due to the fact that the guild master is a guy but the rest of the members are all essentially girls. Despite ... that, this really didn’t feel like a harem manga at all. The standard harem type cast structure is there in terms of the male/female ratio. However, it really doesn’t have a harem like atmosphere at all, rather it felt like the whole harem aspect is only used for gags. There really isn’t any romance or romantic fluff in the manga at all.

It more so embodies standard shounen tropes surrounding friendship and such, just with the group of friends being a group of girls centered around a guy. This manga is pretty good at showing this group dynamic at times, but overall character wise it felt pretty weak. The guild supposedly has 64 members, but only like 8 of them have any presence. Furthermore, it didn’t really feel like it fleshed out any of them all that well, with what little there was in terms of attempts at character arcs being pretty lackluster. The characters it handles best are actually characters outside of the guild, mainly Magus, who have some really good moments, but they simple aren’t present enough.

Plot wise it also wasn’t particularly strong. This manga fleshes out and gives background to certain aspects of the main story, but in the grand scheme of things these don’t really seem be all that substantial. For example, it shows what happened in Akiba while Shiroe, the protagonist of the main story, and his party were away rescuing a girl named Serara. It turns out that Soujirou was involved in the deterioration of conditions in Akiba that occurred in the main story. However, ultimately as in the main plot, Shiroe is still the one that resolves things once he returns, so it basically just shows that from a new perspective without really adding anything to it. That’s ultimately the case with most all of the plot. The main story is set up such that The West Wing Brigade and Soujirou are constantly present so this spin off can’t just have them off doing something completely unrelated, but at the same time the main story doesn’t have them doing all that much. So this manga basically just shows them hanging around while every so often switching perspectives to the characters from the main story that are moving things forward, mainly Shiroe.

The plot and world building of Log Horizon are strong enough that even this somewhat bizarrely structured and often rushed telling still comes across pretty well. But it isn’t as well told as in the main story, and it doesn’t really feel like this manga is contributing all that much that isn’t already in the main story. If the manga had gotten as far as the Fallen Guardian arc, then I think it could have done something more substantial as the West Wind Brigade actually has a strong presence there and in its aftermath so there was potential to go more in depth into things the main story glossed over. But while the manga does heavily start building up to this arc in the final volumes, the manga ends before it actually gets to it, and the ending overall wasn’t all that satisfying as it just kind of stops at a point that doesn’t leave much of an impression.

The art is fine. The designs are nice and the style can look pretty great, especially in the color pages, but most of the time it doesn’t seem to be using it all that well. The translation felt solid enough judging solely by the English prose. It should be noted though that the terminology is inconsistent with the terminology used elsewhere, such as Overskills being referred to as Mysteries.