Mar 31, 2021
What a disappointing follow-up. I didn't hate it, but I feel so let down, especially because I loved what the previous two seasons brought to the table.
TL;DR: It presents interesting situations, but places the least likable characters in them and forces you to either sit through it or drop it and watch something else.
OVERALL - 4.4/10
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STORY - 6
The story continues from where we left off. Crusty is still stuck overseas, and Rayneshia is struggling with the royal family, who wants to marry her off. The first few episodes features some politics stuff, which I love! But after that, it strays
...
off to focus on the children. I'll speak more on why that's a problem, later.
The rest of this section will go into more detail about what I stated above. Skip to the "Art" section if you want to avoid minor spoilers.
Shiroe comes up with the perfect solution to please the royal family: let's hold an election! I thought this was honestly pretty cool, and it made me hyped for the rest of the season! But after the election concludes, there's no more politics. Shiroe doesn't do anything smart, or clever. We get a two-episode update on what Crusty has been up to in the middle of the season, and then the show spends the rest of it's time following and building up the kids. The way it forces the shift to focusing on the kids is also pretty interesting: a raid / dungeon is introduced, and a quirk of this raid / dungeon is that only low leveled players have a chance of beating it. However, the children are so annoying and shallow, that I can't find myself enjoying their screentime at all.
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ART - 3
This season is overloaded with slow pans of stills, basic reaction shots, and so on. The art in Log Horizon was never really anything special, and I'm fully aware that Log Horizon isn't meant to be loaded with action, but if you're going to make me stare at slow pans of stills for the entire episode, I'd rather have watched paint dry. The shots are lifeless, and it makes it a slog to get through.
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SOUND - 6
The sound is just average. The OP carries the soundtrack, and, as such, is the only reason I am rating it above average. The ED is good, too, and it does a pretty good job at winding down the episode. Log Horizon has always had some of the best EDs I've seen so far (musically, not artistically).
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CHARACTER - 3
Hey, do you remember those mildly annoying kids from earlier that Shiroe and his guild saved from the other guild that was using them as child laborers? Yeah, they're the main characters now. They're all so... shallow. All of their motivations can be reduced to: "I have a crush on [Person X], so I will [do Y] to make them happy." They have no personal desires; only the desire to appease someone else. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the issue I have with it is that they either feature this exact same motivation, or the character simply aren't featured at all.
Minori: "I have a crush on Shiroe, so I will learn how to be a leader to make him happy."
Serara: "I have a crush on Nyanta, so I will learn housekeeping duties to make him happy."
Isuzu: "I have a crush on Rudy, so I will treat him like a puppy to make him happy."
Touya arguably fits into this category, too, but he doesn't obsess over Naotsugu, and it's definitely a much more healthy relationship compared to the others. However, both he and Rudy don't get enough screentime, which is a shame, because they both have a potential to be interesting (with Rudy as a person of the land, and Touya living his life as a cripple before Elder Tale). It's *really* weird that they don't get more screentime, though, especially considering just how much of a focus the show puts on the children.
Aside from the children, the cast is still overcrowded and just as fragmented as ever, with tons of different sidestories happening at once. This wouldn't be a problem if these side characters got more than 2 minutes of screentime per season. No characters really received any development, except for the kids, I suppose, because they "Gain individuality!" or some generic shit like that.
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ENJOYMENT - 4
The first few episodes honestly carried my enjoyment for this season. I had such high expectations, thanks to those episodes, that I was ultimately let down when, in the end, no progress was really made towards any of the problems from the previous season (Aside from Rayneshia's situation)
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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