Log Horizon 2

Episode 9

Akatsuki's Akihabara Adventure is over, meaning we're turning back the clock to check in with Shiroe's own trials. We started this week deep in the raid dungeon, as Shiroe and his party attempted to conquer a completely absurd boss challenge. After a total wipe, we got to see Shiroe's own revival journey back into the real world, and ended with a disappointingly familiar reprise of the moon lake scene from a few weeks ago.

The raid scene that started this episode was pretty solid fun, as they always tend to be. I'm not sure how this drama plays for someone unfamiliar with raid dynamics, but the show has certainly done its best to articulate exactly how combat in these situations works, and I really appreciate all the small details of gameplay that make this feel like a legitimate boss dungeon. The way they count timers, the banter about the boss shifting the timing from attack animation to actual attack, the percentage-based pattern shifts and calls to raise or lower DPS - it's all very real stuff, and does a great deal to make this seem more like a tangible, specific challenge to overcome than some nebulous “giant monster” that they'll only defeat when the plot demands it.

Because of all that work, when the two prior raid bosses emerge at the fifty percent point, it's obvious from moment one that Shiroe's party is absolutely screwed. The aesthetics of this sequence were about as middling as Log Horizon always is (lots of leaping still frames, lots of slow pans), but the ebb and flow of battle was very understandable, which is all I really hope for from this show. And from there, Log Horizon jumped into Shiroe's version of the self-reflection death journey, which turned out to be one of the better moments so far this season.

I was worried Shiroe's trip to the real world was going to be too much a copy of Akatsuki's journey, but his reflections on identity and past failures were actually far more poignant than I would have expected. This scene started with the unsurprising revelation that Shiroe was a loner as a child - but from there, the way it articulated his current thoughts on his old self showed some real thoughtfulness. Instead of feeling bitterness towards his old failures, Shiroe now sees them with the melancholy regret of an adult. He regrets not accepting the kindness he was shown, he regrets not pushing to defend himself when he should have, and he especially regrets not appreciating the work of his parents. Even though this season hasn't spent nearly as much time with Shiroe as with Akatsuki, the line “they were all small failures, but ones I couldn't fix” contrasted against his parents' “sorry about everything” note landed with a real emotional punch. I'm surprised to see this level of sensitivity from Log Horizon, frankly - I doubt much of this show's predominantly young audience will relate to this kind of self-scouring regret (which is likely one of the reasons we've spent so much more time focusing on Akatsuki's “learning to open up to my friends” narrative), and I appreciate the honesty of this moment.

Unfortunately, the moon lake sequence that ended this episode pretty much directly replayed all of the content from Akatsuki's own trip to the moon. I could see the idea of our separate, Shiroe-focused journey to this moment resulting in a different emotional takeaway from this exchange, but given it's only been one episode since we left Akatsuki's narrative, this scene rang more as budget-saving than anything else. If the show was going for some kind of poignant symmetry between the two characters' journeys to this place, that really didn't come through. Meaning that overall, this episode evened out to just below neutral, distinguished by that one emotional highlight from Shiroe and marred by the lazy repetition of the ending.

Rating: B-

Log Horizon 2 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Nick writes about anime, storytelling, and the meaning of life at Wrong Every Time.