Take about 6-7 different storylines, mash them together and you get Overlord. What started out really cool, ended in a disaster. Even now I couldn't tell you what the main storyline was.
At first you think it is about finding some artifact and getting to know the world around the castle the main char lives in. But then you get a completely different storyline about joining somekind of mercenary guild to get information, which leads to another storyline with some weird psychos and suddenly you get the final storyline being the mindcontrolled Shalltear, while none of the storylines before get really solved. You have to guess how they tie in into the „main-story“ if you can decide what the main story is.
The plot is all over the place, with a couple of holes in the story that get infodumped on you in some other scene. The infodumping is a problem in itself. There a lot of moments where something just gets explained, which wouldn't be bad, if it wasn't so often. Sometimes you get scenes where something is explained, then shown and then explained again, which is a bit tiring in the end. Also it slows the pacing really down, which is something that can kill this kind of anime.
All of the fight scenes follow the same scheme, which is really sad, because they could've been really good. There were a lot of potential in the fight scenes, but they couldn't live up to it, a main reason for that was the recurrent explanation of the spells the characters were using. Especially the last fight against Shalltear was so anticlimatic, that it wasn't even fun anymore to watch. Also you always get the same formula: Momon waits until the enemy is exhausted, just to get his trump card out and tell the enemy that that was, what he was planning all along. It just gets boring when every fight is nearly the same.
You get a lot of cool characters, but none of them are shown in depth, instead you get even more characters, more names and more confusing storylines and rules. Some of the characters seem to be important for the main plot, but never really show up again or it isn't explained what happened to them. This is were a lot of the storyholes get really unnerving.
The main character Momon/Ainz Ooal Gown is really shallow and kinda boring. In the beginning I didn't mind how OP he was, but in the end it just gets kinda lame, because they try to trump him over and over again. He was also very inconsistent with the use of his weapons. That is one of the things that doesn't get explained really well, because it fell in one of the random storyholes you get throughout the episodes.
Like in the fight scenes there was a lot of potential in the characters, which just didn't come close to what it could've been. Instead you feel like they are some kind of ensemble, only used when needed.
There were also a lot of conflicts that could've been cool, but they were never really touched again, after introducing them (like Albedo vs. Shalltear etc.). Also the story with Sebas doesn't really get a lot of explanation. The last five to six episodes you see him traveling through the country and in the end he is sitting in a castle looking out of the window into a storm.
The subplots are just really all over the place.
The last two episodes were so hilarious I couldn't even take it serious anymore. He summoned a sharknado, that should tell you enough. The ending is a massive cliffhanger setting up a second season, but when you finish the first one, you don't want another. The ending is so disappointing and open. You don't even know what to think.
While you get the feeling that you should be happy, that the group is together again and making jokes, you just get a lot of question marks for the rest of the story.
I wouldn't recommend this, because thanks to the massive infodumping, non-existing mainplot, bad fight scenes and seemingly unimportant characters that have a lot of potential, you simply don't get enough out of it to justify watching thirteen episodes of this anime. The best thing was the giant hamster <3
