Recap

An army of goblins begins to mass, threatening to attack major settlements. As Shiroe and the Round Table representatives negotiate with the Landers, Minori’s group decides to go on the offensive.

Iro’s Thoughts

Finally, what seems to be the meat of this arc begins. It’s been seemingly nothing but words words words for the past several episodes, so it’s nice to see something happening on a larger scale. That said, it still sort of lapses into just more talking in both plotlines, which I can’t help but find disappointing. I realize Log Horizon is meant to be a very word-heavy show, but the ratio of talking to action is becoming dangerously bloated. Normally it’s a good idea to interpose the talky storyline (i.e., Shiroe’s group having meetings at the palace) and the actiony one (the kids taking the fight to the goblins), but it sort of falls apart when the action is only for a few seconds each time.

That criticism aside, the events are still enjoyable enough and continue to drip-feed us information about the world of Elder Tale. The goblin army is quickly deduced to be part of a regularly scheduled global event, one that rarely occurred in the real world because players would always complete the relevant raid. It makes logical sense that all the Adventurers would be too busy trying to survive to raid a special event dungeon, especially since it’s likely off in a corner somewhere, It also gives us a sense of how game mechanics have been affected: while the game event probably just increased spawn rates of goblins, now thousands of them are massing at once. This highlights the strength of Log Horizon‘s worldbuilding, which is some of the best I’ve seen in a while. The best way to get a viewer interested in a world is to make them curious, and explaining the goblin event gets us thinking that there might be other scheduled events behind the scenes, and what those might mean for the world. We start to think about what’s in the background and may or may not ever be shown to us, and that makes the world more interesting.

While it’s great to see the kids starting to get braver and more comfortable with combat, it’s hard to shake the feeling that their efforts are nearly pointless. They seem to be killing goblins only a few at a time, and there are hundreds heading towards Choushi. I suppose it makes sense if they’re only holding off the goblins long enough for the level-90 Adventurers to arrive and bring the pain, but it removes some of the impact of Minori’s seemingly grand plan. Perhaps they actually are making a sizeable dent in the goblins’ numbers, and the anime just doesn’t have the budget to show it? Either way, I’m hoping for a grand battle of vastly-outnumbered Adventurers taking out an army of goblins. I doubt we’ll get one, though.

On the politics side, it’s cringe-worthy to see the Landers try and manipulate the Adventurers into helping them, partly because they’re terrible at it and partly because they really are in a desperate situation. Lenessia finally becomes relevant, demanding to go to Akibahara to rally Adventurers to her cause, a scene that seems to be shown in the OP sequence. I’m still not really on board with her character, but I suspect this has more to do with my seething dislike of Crusty than Lenessia’s characterization. That said, making her someone who only wants to laze around with no responsibilities almost feels like a laser-targeted approach to making her relatable for the target otaku audience, and I’m not sure I approve of something so seemingly ham-fisted. It seems like we’re gearing up for a big, rousing speech next episode, and I hope it’ll be engaging and enjoyable.