Going by the total Score of Shangri-La Frontier, its a quite popular anime, possibly a must watch. From watching the trailer, I had high hopes for this anime. Unfortunately, it was not for me.
There are a few spoilers in this review, mostly located in my character section.
Summary of the anime content
The anime protagonist is a guy who likes to play trash games. His local game store recommends he takes a break from his specialty to try Shangri-La Frontier, a mainstream game that since it aired has only gotten more and more players. Its advertised that this game has practically unlimited options, making everyone's
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gameplay unique.
This is essentially what caught my interest in this anime. I love worldbuilding. Fantasy is my go to genre. From the sound of it, this game was basically a fantasy world with some game mechanics.
Unfortunately, that was not the case. Based on dialogue from other members of the cast, everyone more or less follows the same path. Everyone starts in the same region, and to get to the next region, you have to take on a boss. The main character, being "special" basically just runs straight to the boss, beats it, and continues on his way. The rest of the story follows the same format. The main character is speed running the game, with him getting very unique, special content that allows him to continue at a pace no one else seems to match.
We aren't ever given any details about players besides the main character and a posse of friends he gets later on in the anime, so why they play is a mystery. The only thing we learn about a major storyline is there are these unique monsters roaming around in the world. Several guilds have been focusing on defeating these monsters. Once you kill one of these monsters, they are gone from the world for good.
As you can imagine, these monsters become the main character's game goal.
Story & Plot
The story suggests that this is a world for thousands of players, but to me it seems limited to one: the main character. I wouldn't say its well developed. For the most part, I'd say its a drama anime, that's focused completely on character interaction and combat. The main character has your typical overpowered protagonist personality, one of confidence and self assuredness, who always seems happy unless he's being angry in a scene that's more comedic than serious. I've heard that these types of characters exist a lot because people like to imagine themselves in their shoes, but honestly they just annoy me.
For a story that is allegedly unique and full of experiences for players, I definitely felt like it moved too fast. I think the main character got through 4-5 regions in this season. Seeing as there are 24 episodes, that seems like a decent amount, but I'd say only one episode at most was used to explore for each. The episodes mostly focus on action and drama.
I can't really say the plot was predictable, simply because there didn't seem like there was enough plot to predict.
For characters and monsters, I think the anime did a really good job designing them. I really like monsters.
Characters
I don't feel like the main characters were well developed, and this was a problem because when not in combat, all you really got in this anime was dialogue. I disliked most of the main cast and none of the minor characters interested me, which is probably the reason I couldn't enjoy the anime in the slightest. Below are my reasons why, there's going to be a bit of spoilers here.
The main character, Sunraku
I'd say he's got your typical overpowered protagonist personality. Very confident, always seems happy, when he's angry its just for comedy skits that aren't that funny. He also doesn't know how to shut up. When he's in combat, he's monologuing the entire damn time. You could probably listen instead of watching and you'd probably get a good idea of what's going on.
The trash gamer thing I feel is very flawed. Basically, the anime and characters treat him like someone who specializes in games like Dark Souls, but with the added bonus of your character lagging or not being able to do certain things to make the game much harder.
These games he's playing are the type where you're basically in a different world, so I feel like if he's always playing these games where his movement and actions are obstructed so much, his player instincts should be so fucked up. But instead, they just make him out to be a pro.
Also, whenever the anime pulled out a twist in the game content that's supposed to make things challenge, he liked to say something around the lines of "oh now this is a bugged game". That destroyed any shallow level of immersion I'd gained to evaporate.
Pencilgon, the player killer
Pencilgon is the heroine of this anime, and they did their best to make her out as a badass anti hero character that only cares about herself. They did it well enough that I couldn't care less about her. She knew Sunraku from other games, but she'd been playing Shangri La for a quite a while before Sunraku joined. Because of circumstances, Sunraku quickly became infamous in Shangri La, which make her go and seek him out.
At the time, Pencilgon was part of the Ashura-Kai, an infamous guild that specialized in player killing. She ends up betraying her comrades, letting a bunch of big name guilds know the location of the Ashura-Kai hideout while taking Sunraku and Oikatso to take on a unique monster - the Ashura-Kai were using the monster as exp and were keeping its location a secret.
After they took out the unique monster, there's a scene where a defeated Ashura-Kai rages pitifully at Pencilgon for betraying them, and Sunraku and gang basically mock them and act like they shouldn't be allowed to play games.
Honestly that scene disgusted me and made me decide this wasn't an anime I liked. Its common for game focused anime to act like player killers are the worst people out there. However, I feel like that should be more of a game flaw. Seeing as this is fictional, its entirely possible to make up a system that makes it fair for player killers and other players. For example, let's say when a player dies, a random item in their inventory should be a drop item. if you are a player killer, if someone kills you, any item you stole and had on your person should always drop, no matter how many items you have. That way, its kind of fair. People who decide to be player killers end up with a bigger gamble, but playing killing is still an option that doesn't punish other players immensely.
Giving more context, Shangri La had recently updated gameplay so that if anyone kills a player killer, they get to have everything the player killer owns. If you don't know their hideout, you can only grab the stuff they dropped, but if you loot the hideout all of their stuff is yours.
As you can imagine, that was a nail in the coffin for Ashura-Kai, who specialized in player killing. Pencilgon literally went out of her way to make them lose everything they'd ever gained, just cause she didn't feel like it was fun being part of their guild anymore. And while there is an argument of karma, I just don't feel its fair. The game made player killing possible, and then they just randomly decide to make it such a bad decision that no one in their right mind would do it. At the very least, I feel like it should have given a blank slate to previous killers. Instead, it backed them into a corner they couldn't escape, with apparently no punishment for those who kill a player killer. The anime gave the Ashura-Kai members the most shallow personalities possible, but honestly it made me hate the anime more rather than the characters.
Oikatso
Oikatso is honestly the only one I kind of liked in the series. He's a pro gamer, and he's there to have fun and fight. He was basically there to lighten the mood and add another main cast character.
Emul
Emul is an npc that tags along with Sunraku since her debut. She's essentially a mascot character. I'd say she's better than most mascot characters that are in anime with no reason. At first Sunraku was against using her in combat, his reason being he didn't want to rely on npc characters. That completely changes later, as he adds another npc character to his party and just lets the two of them do most of the work. I didn't dislike Emul, but didn't like this plothole.
Rei Saiga
Rei Saiga is the love interest in the anime. She has a major crush on Sunraku, and is the main reason Sunraku's gamestore contact recommended the game to him. However, she doesn't really do anything. She's immensely powerful in the game, but the anime made it a comedy skit where no matter how much she looked she never ended up catching up to Sunraku to help him learn how to play Shangri La Frontier and going on a quest with him.
Overall Quality
I'd say the overall quality of the animation was good. There wasn't anything wrong with it and I don't remember seeing any specific as cgi. Episode 15-18 was particularly amazing. If it wasn't for the Ashura-Kai encounter right after, those episode alone might have changed my opinion of the anime. If you're going to watch Shangri-La Frontier, you must watch up to that point.
Overall Impression
There were some really good parts, but for the most part I just tolerated the content. There was some parts that made me frustrated enough to fast forward through the anime, and others that made me disgusted. I definitely can't say I liked it.
I really liked the openings of this anime. I have an album of anime music I like to listen to, and I've added them to that album. However, I've found that listening to the songs piss me off as my mind begins to think about the anime, so I will probably be removing them in the near future.
All in all, I can't recommend this anime. However, I hope I explained well enough that you have a good idea of what I disliked and you can decide for yourself if you share the same tastes as me. If you only want drama and action, this is probably the anime for you.
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