On November 8th (like in two weeks!) Overlord: The Sacred Kingdom will hit theaters. I should have made this suggestion earlier, but here’s my pitch.
One of the few anime I feel comfortable suggesting to non-anime fans (albeit nerdy ones) is Overlord. The set-up is bog standard isekai, featuring a gamer who finds himself stuck as his character in a real world of swords, sorcery and monsters very much like Yggdrasil, the game he played obsessively for a decade. However, the show’s execution sets it head and shoulders nearly all other such programs.
The main gimmick here is that a salaryman from an environmentally-devastated future Japan finds himself and his entire once fictional guildhall and roster of powerful NPCs transported to this new world. The NPCs, lovingly crafted over a decade of intensely nerdy play by him and his sorely missed absent fellows, are now fully sentient. The salaryman, meanwhile, is incarnated as his character and the guild’s leader, Momonga (soon renamed Ainz Ooal Gown), who is basically an Elder Lich.
However, their guild was a villainous one and nearly all of the NPCs were designed to be forthrightly evil. Suddenly the NPCs are alive and look upon Ainz as the one god that didn’t desert them. Their loyalty to him is fanatical, as they do not know that, at least mentally, he’s but a flawed and very fallible human.
Remember that list from a couple of decades back, a litany of things an Evil Overlord should avoid doing? As an avid gamer Ainz follows those strictures to the letter. After all, he doesn’t know if any other players also made it to this new world, or what the native power levels are here. He needn’t worry, as it turns out. Ainz and his underlings are basically a gaggle of Supermen (and Wonder Women) tossed into a world of Spider-Men. Over the show’s four seasons of 12 episodes each, The Great Tomb of Nazarick and its denizens slowly come into the open in their new world, disrupting and eventually dominating…well, pretty much everything.
Look, what can I tell you? This show has some of the most impeccable world-building I’ve ever seen. Pretty much everything makes sense and I can’t think of a single incident that occurred just for plot convenience. It’s at times funny and horrifying and exciting and very cool and makes you think a lot and all that good stuff. It’s definitely grim at time, but remember, this is me recommending it. My usual anime cup of tea is K-On! or Super Cub or Bofuri. If I can make it over that hurdle, I’m sure you can too. If you want to.
I can’t think of any other property this dark (at times) that I love as much as I do this one. It’s certainly not any darker than, say, Game of Thrones, and doesn’t have the sucking we now associate with that franchise. I will say that the first episode has a bare few moments of dark sexuality that don’t really come into play very much. There’s a bit of that sort of thing here and there during the show’s run, but it’s a very minor element. I only even mention it because, again, there’s a bit of it in the first episode, which might suggest it’s more of a thing than it really is.
The upcoming movie covers events occurring, but basically elided over, in the show’s 4th season. All four seasons are now on Netflix, although if you by chance also have a Crunchyroll subscription, I’d watch it there. The subtitles are better. (I think there’s also a dub, but…blech.)
The film will be playing all that week (at least) and be available both in subtitled Japanese and (gaak) dubbed English. It’s even playing on some Imax screens, including one by my house. I have my ticket bought already.
