Log Horizon
I was bored yesterday and decided to check this out cause it was on the front page meh anime site of choice.
And .... I FLIPPING LOVED IT! Blasted through all 11 episode, very cool stuff. At first I thought "Oh, yet another "OMG, I'm trapped in a Game (That one anime with the annoying MC)/ MMO (Sword Arts)/ REAL WORLD VERSION of a game!!!(That bomb x halo game anime)". This should be cheesy ...". But I was surprised!
Unlike Sword Arts there's none of this duel world stuff. We don't know how they ended up there, but it does seem to be a true game world. It also replaces the shameless fan service with humor and the emo "we're all doooom! D:" PoV with and lighthearted sense of friendship and exploration as well as a nice look into gamer-mindsets.
I do find a few things off though. Like the fact that no one talks about their past/ real world lives ... outside of the bro&sis pair's flashback showing that the boy loss his legs in an attempt to save her. And they never really go into the depth at which one can harm someone in this world. They talk about how imprisonment and kidnapping should now hold a much higher degree of weight to them seeing as the players can't die ... but how far can they go? Can they enslave and harm People Of The Land? And, of of course, I would have figured that we would have seen a man in a female Ava by now given how common that would be.
All in all I like it! Funny, not too mature, very lighthearted and the MC doesn't fall into the cruddy common loner trope. Sure, he's a loner ... but that's something he has learned to deal with to the point where he was actually able to make a ton of friends in this game. He also doesn't fall into that BS cool guy-beats-ALL-THE-THINGS-because-of-speed-and-hax like Sword Arts Online. Nice seeing team work in a MMO setting that makes sense.