Overview

Overlord II is the second season of the MMORPG isekai anime Overlord. A third season of the series is already scheduled to air this Summer.

I feel I need to start off by saying that Overlord II doesn’t follow the same plot from the first season. At the end of season one, it’s hinted that there are other players from the real world who were also sent into the game and that they are the ones who used mind control magic on Shalltear. We also get a final scene that shows a number of new characters.

In the second season, however, none of that comes into play. The plot about other players interfering with Ainz Ooal Gown’s plans never comes up and we also don’t meet any of the new characters who were shown at the end of season one.

Instead, we are introduced to a bunch of other new characters; way too many new characters. And with all of these new characters come multiple plot lines all happening at once rather than one main plot like in the first season. I’ll do my best to explain these in a way that makes sense.

The first roughly one-third of the season is taken up by an arc involving the Lizardmen, a race of humanoid lizards. This arc seemingly has nothing to do with anything else in the season and should probably have just been included in a later season as a flashback to explain something.

After that arc is where everything splits off. We have one plot about some adventurer guild called the Blue Roses who are fighting against organized crime in the region. Another plot that intertwines with that one involves Sebas, the leader of the Pleiades Maids, rescuing some girl from the criminals in the region.

There’s a third plotline that also intertwines with the first two and involves three of the stronger knights of the kingdom, Brain, Stronoff, and Climb. These three basically get involved in everything, but their story starts off with an encounter between Brain Unglaus and Shalltear.

A fourth, more separate, plot involved Ains Ooal Gown and Demiurge plotting their takeover of the region through various means. There are probably other plots I’m forgetting about at this point, but they all come together at the end of the season in one giant mess; including the Lizardmen arc to some extent.

New Characters

Since there are now way too many characters in the series, I’ll be skipping over the characters who appeared in the first season for the most part and just focusing on the new characters. That said, there are also too many new characters so I’ll just pick out some of the most important ones from each storyline in the season.

In the Lizardmen arc, the main characters are two Lizardmen brothers, Zaryusu and Shasryu Shasha. One of them is the leader of one of the five Lizardmen tribes and the other is considered an outsider because he left the tribe to travel and gain knowledge about the outside world (I forget which is which).

The adventurers’ group known as the Blue Roses has a number of highly skilled adventurers who are in the Adamantite class. Of these, two are especially skilled. The first is Gagaran, a woman who looks a lot like He-Man. The other is Evileye the most powerful magic user of the Blue Roses.

From the plot revolving around Sebas of the Pleiades Maids, we have the new character Tsuare. She’s basically just some normal human girl who was kidnapped by slave traders. Sebas decides to rescue her because he thinks that’s what the one who created him would have done.

From the next plotline, we get two new swordsmen, Brain Unglaus and Climb. Brain was once one of the strongest swordsmen in the kingdom, able to match Stronoff who we met in season one. Climb is the personal knight to the princess of the kingdom.

As I mentioned, there are plenty of other new characters, but these ones I chose were those who had fairly important roles other than just being important because they’re a leader of some group. Sure the leader of the Blue Roses and the princess are important, but they haven’t really done much themselves yet.

Conclusion

While I liked most of this season, I think it only deserves a 6/10. The first third of it was taken up by the Lizardmen arc which felt more like filler than anything else, and the season didn’t even pick up where the first one left off.

However, even though I gave both seasons a 6 so far, I am looking forward to the third season with hopes of the first two seasons being tied together.

Overview

Since Overlord season 2 is scheduled to release Winter 2018, I decided it was about time to watch the original season so I watched it all yesterday.  Also you should keep in mind that this genre of MMORPG-type life in another world isn’t really my favorite.

I’ll start by saying that Overlord is probably the best I have seen in this genre, though that isn’t saying too much when the others I can think of off the top of my head are Sword Art Online and Log Horizon.  In my opinion, one of the most surefire ways to make your life in another world anime bland is to go the MMORPG route.

Skipping over the genre’s clichés for now, I think my least favorite part of this anime was their use of 3D animation.  I’m sure they used it in parts where I didn’t even notice, and that’s fine, but I’m not a fan of the generic 3D animation look that all the skeletal enemies in the show had.

Characters

Momonga, or Ainz, is the main character and he looks like a large skeleton.  Luckily, he wore armor that hid his edgy looks for at least half of the anime.  Like many main characters in this genre, he is overpowered.  He could destroy everything easily if he wanted to so for the most part there aren’t any real threats.

Next is Ainz’ right-hand woman, Albedo.  Along with everyone else in the guild except Ainz, she is an NPC.  She could have been a great character, but they decided to turn her into fan service.  At least when she is in her armor and ready for battle they cut back on both her fan service appearance and attitude.  It’s really the way she acts that disappoints me the most.

From here on, we’ll just group the rest of the characters.

We have the Guardians which are led by Albedo.  They guard the different floors of Ainz’ guild hall.  Each one is some different stereotypical character such as a demon in a suit or, my personal favorite, the vampire who dresses in gothic lolita fashion.

Finally, below the Guardians are the various other NPCs who are basically servants.  Among these are the Pleiades Battle Maids who appear to be some of the best characters in the show.

Conclusion

Since Overlord was decent enough, I am looking forward to the second season this Winter.  Unfortunately, however, my hopes aren’t too high for the next season because it seems like it’s going to become even more MMORPG based than before.

In the end I almost gave Overlord a 7, but decided that there were too many small things I didn’t like about it that added up.  This means it gets a 6/10 which as I mentioned at the beginning is still good enough to beat the other anime in the genre I could think of.