Do you like playing computer games? Many humans do. They often try to soothe their existential angst by pretending to be someone powerful in those games. Someone like an undead magician.
That is probably also true of “Momonga”, the game character of a player that is the leader of the guild “Ainz Ooal Gown”.
But as time goes by, that game suffers the same as everything else: People leave it, for whatever reasons. So when the day comes that the servers are to be shut down, only Momonga is there, with only one other guild member out of 41 visiting for a short time.
Momonga takes his farewell from the Great Tomb of Nazarick, as the guild area is called, and also of the NPCs there (and making an embarrassing decision on a whim).
Then he sits down to see the timer go to zero. Three, two, one, zero… and the servers are still up! And he, Momonga, is stranded in a world that he knows well, but that is still quite different, for suddenly every single NPC seems to be alive and “real”…
Well, the background story is not that different from a lot of “lost in game” anime. There are a few things that are not usual though.
First is the character of the main person, a skeletal Lord. Second are the amount and design of NPCs that play a secondary role.
The guardians of the guild are made by different players, each one with his or her own quirks and behavior, but all loyal to their boss, whom they think of as a “higher being”.
Also in other anime the main character seldom goes out to subdue the world just because it sounds interesting and may help to find other players that may exist somewhere.
With this goal in mind, Momonga decides to assume two roles. One of an undead Lord, who takes over the world to spread the name of the (once very famous) guild, which name he assumes.
The second role is that of an adventurer. He calls himself Momon and goes out under the disguise of someone who does not want his face to be seen (in the rare cases he has to, he uses an illusion spell).
As a player he easily outranks everyone he meets. But of course he cannot go alone, so he takes one of the guild’s few human-looking NPCs with him. Unfortunately that NPC, Narberal Gamma, or Nabe as adventurer, is not very fond of the insects. The ones on two feet.
Finally an anime where a lot of the main’s supporting characters describe humans as the filthy bugs they are! Maid-chan feels refreshed!
Speaking of supporting characters, the Great Tomb of Nazarek is home to a score of lesser personnel and some seriously strong area or level guardians. And then there are the “Battle Maids Pleiades”, not exactly Maids and not exactly made for fighting purposes, they still get a lot of the action.
Aren’t they cool? Maid-chan would fit right in!
What follows is a lot of fighting and quite some politics from someone who does not feel like he is a good leader and tries to hide that fact (and others) from his own underlings.
And of course he is right! Quite a lot does not go as planned, even if it seems so, and Momon’s/Ainz’s conclusions often leave quite some room for future disasters.
One of this is when one of the guild’s strongest NPC gets mind-controlled and he has to fight her himself and kill her (to be costly revived).
Conclusion
Overlord was first published as a web novel on the Japanese website Shōsetsuka ni Narō (where e.g. Log Horizon or Re:Zero also started).
Likely as a result of that the anime is far less episodic then most. There often are no real cliffhangers, but you still want to watch the next episode because the story is always rolling on.
The current two seasons of the anime include the first 6 light novels of currently 13 (also available in English, number 13 this month). There is still a lot that has to happen until the undead Lord Ainz has the whole world in his hands, so Maid-chan hopes the anime will continue. There certainly are a lot of people who want more from Ainz Ooal Gown!
On the other hand, maybe also because of the novel background, which seems to be planned for a very long series, the anime feels a bit goal-less. Maid-chan feels like it is still the opening game and the author is still busy with putting the play pieces on the board.
Because of this, at the moment, Maid-chan can “only” give 8/10 points on the completely objective Maid-chan scale.
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