After an update of a world played mmorpg, many players worldwide have been trapped in the game, and have to learn to survive in this environment that will be their new home. The back bone of the world is a post-apocalyptic earth where nature would invade abandoned cities, combined with a medieval-fantasy world, and the attention is directed solely on japan, with a focus on the city of akihabara (Tokyo). As it is a rpg world, it is of course monsters and PNJ. And since the world is sometimes working as a game, and sometimes working as a real world, strange things happen with them. But while it's interesting to discover, I often had the feeling of being cheated by how things works. It's used more by convenience to make a background and plot twists, rather than following a real logic. It burns the eyes and the ears sometimes.
A big part of the story involves how the mechanics of the world works, how they changed from before, and how they are changed. "Will they respawn if they die?" will be one of first question brought forward of course, but many others will follow. Sadly, it will open more questions that aren't, or can't be, answered. Only a faint light will be brought on how the world works, narrowing the sight of the viewer only on the chosen focus. And this kills the immersion. You simply can't dive into the world with the few explanations given to you, and how blurry they are. It would take many books to explore the possibilities their world open, yet they only give you a glance at it, and force you to eat the things they come up with. It is not done well, and the story suffers significantly from it. In a world where your limitation isn't what the game allows you to do, but the laws of physics and magic, you open yourself to limitless possibilities, and can't just limit it to what is convenient to you, especially it's given such importance.
The story, as said before, is centered on 3 aspects: the discovery of the world and its laws, the mmo side of completing and building things, and the emotions of the characters involved and their personal development. This said, all the story is built around the emotions and the people, while the rest is used to bring those moments, in a very pronounced way. While feelings give an interesting dimension to the anime, they are most of the time poorly exploited. In an attempt to make the viewer laugh, you will be fed with uninteresting unraveled love stories. In addition, to give a dramatic side, a huge part of the show will focus on the distress of characters you won't care about, or care enough. There isn't a single interesting character with a (realistic) personality. When you story is emotion driven, it just kills it. At some point, I choose to skip parts that were too annoying. When skip a 5 minutes part of a 20 minutes episode, I believe you can say it is pretty tasteless filling. The dialogues are also pretty bad, being often cheesy and way too long. Globally, this makes for a very slow story, with not much happening.
Social interaction as you might have guessed is big part of log horizon, since it's a mmorpg. Again, a lot of potential brought up here, as you have people with very different social status and background that meet, plus the interaction with a medievalesque culture. So much potential, yet such an appealing result. The anime makes a really good job at bringing those ideas forward, but always use them so poorly. It is quiet sad. Even the men-women relations are shortened to some kind broken love stories and harem bullshit, to the point where I started to call it harem horizon. But wait, there is more, as every story needs it baddies, that are bad because reasons. Every mmo has its PK, who kills because they want to, but can suddenly become good people because they are not needed as bad people anymore. The magic of imaginary personalities who have no depth.
To summarize, I must say log horizon is doing an amazing job at bringing you an interesting world, with interesting concepts, but fails miserably at using them, and that’s pretty sad. All it does is shoving you with some bullshit feelings you don't care. No cookies for you, harem horizon.
