*SPOILER WARNING* i might have to put some spoilers here and there for this review. I don't think those spoilers are all that relevant, but you have been warned.
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Overlord is truly a mystery to me, in that i feel like i just can't understand its appeal. For some reason a lot of people here have given it a really good score and its average is 8.04 as of now, and I just can't understand what this success comes from. I don't like saying that, but when I watched the show, the two main emotions i felt while watching were boredom from how bad it was
...
to me and frustration from all the potential it wasted. Why did i feel like that about our savior Ainz Ooal Gown's tale? Let's find out in this review:
The first problem I have with this show is its visuals. Don't get me wrong, the art is decent, the characters are almost always on model when they're not in CG and some character designs are legitimately good. The issue is that the animation itself does not really move that much, and seeing almost still shots of characters talking about things i don't really care about for at least five minutes per episode without clever directing, storyboarding or art direction to back it up makes me sleepy. Most of the action scenes aren't that visually entertaining either. The action scenes in this show either lack impact or are made with jarring CGI. When i say that the action scenes lack impact, i mean that the directing can make a huge explosion look like it wasn't really strong, even though it just blew an enemy right to the shadow realm. At the beginning of the fight against a certain vampire lady in the last couple of episodes, there's literally minutes and minutes of build-up where momonga is basically buffing himself to be the most overpowered he could be, and then the payoff is an enormous laser thingy falling from the sky... that destroyed trees i guess but didn't feel like the massively destructive blast it should have been. Though i have to give credit to the final fight scene for having somewhat good animation, they almost delivered correctly on that.
The second thing that frustrates me in Overlord is the under-exploitation of almost everything the show sets up. In the first episodes, there's a couple of plot points and themes that are set up, just to remain unexploited in the rest of the series, which is a shame because if it expanded on them (and had 24 episodes to do so) the series could have been excellent. Here are a few examples of those unexploited gold mines the show had:
1. The loss of Momonga's humanity: after getting trapped in this fantasy world, momonga changes a bit. If i remember correctly, he doesn't need to eat anymore, and he feels less emotions, especially when it comes to killing people. Now if the changes in his mental state were pushed to the point where he or his servants (i'll come back to them later) would start questioning his actions, that would have been super interesting to me.
2. Momonga's servants: from my understanding, Overlord almost did the same thing as log horizon, where the game's NPCs gained a personality and a backstory. Some of those NPCs are what is, for my money, the most underexploited element of the whole show: the servants. A lot of them seem like they would be awesome if they were to fight, and they seriously need some character development. Most of their designs are at least really good and seeing characters like cocytus, sebas or demiurge get a good fight scene would give me the hardest of all boners (especially cocytus, i wanted to love that guy but he has little to no screen time). Even Albedo could have been made into a likeable character if she had her own character arc. This wouldn't have been as much of a problem if Momonga was a more interesting character and if the show had other qualities to make up for it but it doesn't.
3. Discovering the world of yggdrasil: one of the things momonga sets out to do when he gets trapped is to explore the huge world he is in to find out if there are other trapped players like him. Unfortunately, this is once again something the show fails to exploit as much as it could. The environments aren't all that interesting to look at, and while some game mechanics are rather interesting, the world building is criminally underdone.
Those are not the only frustrating underdone parts of the show, but i feel like they are some of the most important ones.
My third issue with Overlord is the protagonist himself, the one and only Ainz Ooal Gown aka Momonga-sama (or just Momonga if he doesn't want to attract too much attention)
The main problem i have with him is that i just don't understand what kind of character he's supposed to be. He is supposedly the most powerful character in the story, yet one of his servants evaluates his chances of survival for the final fight to only 30% or less.
From what i've heard that one of the main points of Momonga's character is that he acts like a villain, yet none of the things he does are that cruel. He killed Clementine whom is a lot of people's waifu and that's slightly evil i guess but that doesn't make him that much of a villain. I mean he even legitimately cares a lot about his servants and saves some people who were getting killed by random evil knights in a village.
He's supposed to have lost some of his humanity or something and then we see him getting embarrassed from times to times, mostly from albedo's sexual needs but also when he literally facepalms about the personality he gave to pandora's actor (the most entertaining character in the show to me)
What is so problematic about Momonga being a boring character is that he's one of the only, if not the only relevant appeal of the whole series
Another annoying thing is that the series kind of fails at making me care about it. Nothing about the world or characters feels like it's going to be so interesting. Yggdrasil seems at first like a stereotypical MMORPG, and unfortunately it stays that way. As soon as Momonga tells his servants to guard the different levels of his huge dungeon thing where he lives i immediately thought "oh no those cool looking characters are going to be completely irrelevant, what a shame."
The slow pacing doesn't help any of the aforementioned problems.
In the end, Overlord mostly suffers from its wasted potential. Is it a bad show? Judging from the number of people who seem to like or even love it, it's up to you. Do i recommend it? Certainly not, everything it does has been done better in a lot of shows.
Please note that this is my first review, so my writing probably isn't very good. If you disagree with this review (which is most likely the case, i may have missed a few things in the show since i didn't pay that much attention due to how boring it was), i invite you to respectfully comment on my profile about that.
Thank you for bearing my terrible writing all the way to the end of this painful review, and have a nice day, whether you believe in the almighty Ainz Ooal Gown or not.
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Oct 22, 2017
*SPOILER WARNING* i might have to put some spoilers here and there for this review. I don't think those spoilers are all that relevant, but you have been warned.
----------------------------- Overlord is truly a mystery to me, in that i feel like i just can't understand its appeal. For some reason a lot of people here have given it a really good score and its average is 8.04 as of now, and I just can't understand what this success comes from. I don't like saying that, but when I watched the show, the two main emotions i felt while watching were boredom from how bad it was ... |
