Let's start with the premise. This one's a mixed bag. It's your standard Isekai light novel adaptation where someone is trapped in a popular MMO with a few key differences. First, the main protagonist, Ains, is a gigantic lich who was the head of a monster-themed guild. The second is that he's the only one that was trapped in the game and seemingly entirely on accident. The big problem here is that it's never adequately explained how or why this happened. The first episode starts of pretty strong with its premise with the NPCs suddenly becoming way more lifelike and the world around Ains gets a lot more dynamic depth to it all of the sudden. The first few episodes do a wonderful job of setting up the main dilemma, introducing the main character as well as several secondaries.
This would have been nice if it were consistent. A major complaint about the setting I had was that while the first half of the series tries to make a real fantasy world that explains weird parts of MMO logic but then mid-way through seems to forget that and we soon get characters talking about HP and MP pools, abilities, items, and the like as if they all suddenly remembered they used to be a video game. It was frankly jarring and while it's assumed that Ains trusted his monster lieutenants that he was part of a guild that created and programmed them as part of a video game AND that they both understood and believed him, it's never hinted at and we're just left to assume that it had to have happened because it was the only thing that made sense. It was bluntly absolutely jarring.
Ains himself will make or break the show depending on how you view him. He's another Isekai overpowered character but I felt he was an OP character done right. As a max-level player who's been playing the game at the head of a highly-successful and dedicated guild for years, he was one of the game's big shots and had a huge amount of power, wealth, resources and fun magic items at his disposal. This at least makes Ains a believable OP character as we can clearly understand why he's as powerful as he is in a way that makes sense in the context of the story. However his personality and motivations are vague and hard to follow. His lieutenants had far more actual personality than he did and none of them got enough limelight to really shine in any meaningful way. They're introduced in the second episode and feel like they're going to be important but wind up fucking about sitting in the castle while Ains does stuff with less interesting characters for most of the show.
What saved me from giving up on this series was mostly how much I enjoyed WATCHING it. The visuals are great with very nice and interesting character designs that were just distinct enough to be cool but not elaborate enough to be gaudy. The visuals and magic effects in this show are great and the fight scenes are really fun to watch. Overall I enjoyed Overlord and I wouldn't dissuade someone who was interested from giving it a shot purely on that reason. But the story falling on its face half the time might be a problem for people with less patience.
Unfortunately the biggest issue I had is that things take a nose-dive story wise. There is never any concrete goal for the main character other than to gather information and he chooses to go about it in increasingly complicated ways for no discernible reason. It's JJBA levels of overplanning without the explosive payoff most of the time. The other big issue is that while the first few episodes do a great job of establishing the world we're watching, nothing really truly progresses past that. Several episode-long mini-arcs feel like they could have been compressed into single episodes or even parts of them. Too many characters and factions are introduced with the expectation of them being critical to the plot only to have things fall flat and have them be forgotten. This leaves several unanswered questions that never get adequate time to be explained. Every single story thread in this series was left unresolved by the end... Every. Single. One. It feels like the entire plodding first season was a prelude to a much larger story the show wants to tell but didn't have the time or budget to try and get going, but this leaves the show as it stands feeling like little more than a lengthy introduction.
The show did get greenlit for a second season. I'm hoping it picks things up. I really want to give this another chance.
