So what’s the gist of this show? A guy creates a female player avatar named Lufas for an MMORPG, becomes the strongest in the game via a combination of poopsocking (wow, I haven’t used that term in a while) and being a pay-to-win shitter, and becomes the de facto last boss for one last epic PVP battle before the game shuts down. Immediately after the fight, he accepts an in-game prompt regarding a new challenge, and somehow wakes up within the game world as his female player avatar. I guess the biggest question on everyone’s mind is… is this still yuri?
So this MMO not only has a big PVP focus, player actions would dictate the story. This is how a player character, Lufas, could somehow become such an important boss even though there’s an actual last boss in the form of a Devil King. This fictional MMO, of course, resembles nothing I’ve ever seen in actual MMOs. Maybe something like it exists out there, but it would have to be incredibly niche. If you’ve never played MMOs, you’d probably have a very distorted idea of what popular MMOs are like from watching anime. A small minority will always wax poetic about PVP and how awesome it is, but very few people actually like PVP focused MMOs. You might look at World of Warcraft (WoW) and say, “Hey, it has a huge PVP population!” Not proportionally, it doesn’t. WoW itself has a huge population, so a small percentage of that might seem large from a pure numbers standpoint. But the vast majority of players do not actually like to PVP.
Anyway, we fast forward two years into the MMO’s future where more than half of the heroes responsible for defeating Lufas have already passed away due to old age. The others could not resist the Devil King, and that’s where we’re at. At first, Lufas claims they don’t have any bone to pick with this Devil King fella. They just want to go sightsee and enjoy their favorite MMORPG in first person, so the NPCs can keep trying to summon another hero if they want. But I mean, the MC did accept the new challenge from the game, so I suspect Lufas will find themselves embroiled in this conflict soon enough.
Lufas first returns to their old haunting grounds just to find a cute anime waifu waiting for them. Well, it’s Dina, their NPC advisor they had forgotten all about. If she had been here all this time, the least she could’ve done was dust the damn place. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of telling and not showing in this opening episode. First, we have to explain the nature of the MMO, which is a boring affair just by itself. But since Lufas has been gone for the past two hundred years, Dina needs to give them a crash course on two centuries of history. Yawn. How could this be fixed? I dunno, have them find recordings of the past or whatever. Like how in Final Fantasy X, Tidus would come across recordings that his father had left behind from his journey all throughout Spira. Don’t just have your NPC advisor tell you stuff.
Moving along, we learn that the MC had collected a bunch of monster pets during their initial reign. The strongest were designated the Twelve Heavenly Stars. I like how one of them has the silhouette of a plain ass human girl. Anyway, after Lufas’s defeat, however, some of those monster pets have joined up with the Devil King. For some reason, Lufas finds this disgraceful and wants to reprimand them. As a result, we finally have the primary objective of the narrative: gather the Twelve Heavenly Stars. This will inadvertently pit them against the Devil King, thereby providing justification for our last boss to become a hero. The whole stars think make me think of Suikoden, but twelve is a far cry from 108.
Unfortunately, we can’t just jump right to the primary objective. We have to do boring stuff like earning money, and that means becoming — sigh — adventurers. The last boss is back to square one as a fucking adventurer. Basically, we’re going to be doing generic adventurer shit like farming orcs. Way to suck any interest I might of had in this show right out of the room. By virtue of being the “last boss,” Lufas is already overpowered. This isn’t your typical RPG journey of growth and self-reflection. They’re just going to murder everything in front of them. And that’s exactly what we see. After brutally destroying a few initial grunts, the entire orc army surrounds them to no avail. Not only does Lufas demolish even the strongest orc effortlessly, they don’t even sound engaged. Well, if they’re bored, then I’m bored too. But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Unless it’s a long-running shounen series, anime MCs are all overpowered aura farmers these days. That’s what the people want and that’s exactly what they’ll get every single season. Sure, in a way, I sort of get it. For a lot of us, just surviving in the real world can be a struggle, so people naturally fantasize about the easy life. But after a while, doesn’t this get a little dull? Aren’t you tired of watching all of these isekai protagonists waltz through their second life without breaking a sweat?
Anyway, this is destined for the “Everything else” pile. I just can’t see this show being interesting enough to dedicate a post to week in and week out.
Stray thoughts & observations:
- I like how there’s just a polar bear in this group of humans and humanoids.
- If given a choice in games, I tend to go with female avatars as well. When asked, guys will usually say that they prefer to stare at a woman’s ass over a man’s ass as justification for playing a female character. But me? It’s fashion. I do not like men’s fashion in most games. It’s either boring or designed specifically to accentuate their masculinity, i.e. giant massive shoulder pads. I hate it. It’s not so much that I’m feminine or that I prefer a feminine look when I play dress up with my digital dolls, but I cringe at the idea of exaggerating my masculinity.
- Personally, I wouldn’t want to wake up in my favorite MMO, i.e. Final Fantasy XIV. I don’t care how critically acclaimed it is or how it has a free trail up to level… uh, what is it again? I dunno, I only log in these days to keep my house. Dawntrail kinda killed my interest in the game. Also, it’s a world dominated by greedy, little potatoes. Big pass on that.
- Lufas’s supposed backstory is that they became an all-powerful conquerer in order to get rid of injustice and inequality. I like how this basic ass trope gets trotted out all the time. Right, if I just rule everyone with an iron fist, no one would ever be evil again! C’mon, other than children, who actually believes this shit?
- The guy (we don’t know his name) doesn’t seem to be in full control of this Lufas avatar despite being responsible for its creation. For example, the avatar has a passive skill that intimidates everyone they speak to even though he might not want to come across so aggressively.
- Interesting that we’re going with the “we” pronoun as opposed to “they.” I guess it’s fitting as a conquerer. There are actually several singular use cases for “we.” For the purposes of this localization, I suppose we’re going with the royal “we,” which rarely gets used anymore in the modern world. I dunno why I’m going on this tangent. I guess I find it somewhat interesting. The premise of the show itself? Meh.
- Our MC wonders if the surviving heroes are also player-controlled, but that would be odd, wouldn’t it? For the human heroes, anyway. Oh, sorry, you can’t keep existing in this fantasy MMO, because you chose the wrong race during character creation!
