Alter Database

A more formal review for Log Horizon will come when I have finished it, I spent most of Sunday powering through the first third, and finished through episode fourteen this evening. I didn’t see SAO, which I am told is this show’s direct competitor, and some say is completely superior to SAO in every way.

Well hell, I think I have enough EM-EM-OOOOO experience to throw into this picture.

Having not seen SAO, I could only go back and reference .hack//SIGN, which I saw right around its air date back when fansubs were tediously downloaded from XDCC bots, because I am that old. I might even still have them somewhere. I don’t remember much of it, because frankly it was fairly dull and uninteresting. .hack was an anime and/or game you watched/played while simultaneously listening to Evanescence and updating your MySpace with how miserable you feel despite being high on privilege at a time before privilege was an internet buzzword. It was most certainly pleb status before SAO took over the position in the last couple years, and it doesn’t take much to do it. Add one part REFERENCES TO GAMES YOU PLAYED and another part MARY SUE and you get a show about all those things you once liked. Adult Swim calls that Robot Chicken. It’s a flawless strategy for printing money in today’s internet-based social economy. I only wish I knew better years ago to capitalize on this bullshit like The Oatmeal does.

Log Horizon appealed to me because my MMO experience was much different. I won’t bore you with all of the details of my heyday in World of Warcraft, but they’re out there on the internets if you choose. Like most things in life, I very much want to be a part of something bigger, something more interesting, and be surrounded by people who rap with me about the things I do.

Don’t misunderstand, I am not Shiroe. I was never that good at World of Warcraft, or a player everyone wanted in their guild. I played the game solo because even though I wanted to play with other people, I was afraid no one really cared to play with me, and most didn’t. I am the type of person who asks if someone wants to hang out without actually just saying “Hey, just fucking come over!”. Part of my social anxiety is that I feel like I am a bother to other people. So I play most games alone, even multiplayer ones. I quit World of Warcraft because by the time my Blood Elf Rogue hit 70 at the time, I wasn’t part of a real guild, it was a huge pain in the ass to get into one on my server, all of my friends that played, played on other servers, and I got bored playing by myself. My wife (then girlfriend) played with me, but she did not like my style of dashing back and forth trying to finish things quickly to level fast, and I wasn’t slowing down and enjoying the game with her. That was always the problem, I was too concerned with the game, with gear, with skills, with trying to be good so that other people would want me to play with them when they don’t know me. I quit because I am retarded.

Log Horizon paints a different picture of what .hack//SIGN tried to. When stuck in the game, resigning to the fate that you’re in it for at least the foreseeable future, you can either putz around and PK people for fun, or you can build something meaningful and set a quality of life for everyone. It takes more than just your player skills, it takes your real-life knowledge and wisdom to learn the rules of the world and adapt to them as needed. That is what separates the good guilds from the shit guilds in the MMOs we play, and it is what separates players who play in the game’s world and become great players of the game, and people who just play the game and don’t care what happens. Watching this really made me want to play WoW again, but that nagging fear of sinking into many sleepless nights trying to do some inane thing, not to mention wanting to remain married, has kept me from doing so. It’s probably an irrational fear, but like all of my fears, it’s there, center-stage. Much like my fears of losing my job for refusing to fix a Ricoh.

A better review of LH will come when I finish it, probably later this week. Instead, have some Akatsuki.

httpss://twitter.com/CirNobar/status/447808430141480961

Yep. Fuck WoW. SLEEPLESS DISGAEA NIGHTS shall return. Because I still haven’t finished 1,3,4, and D2. Only 2. Why only 2? Because Rozalin.