Time for this week’s installment of Watching People Narrate Videogames, Triple Threat Raid Edition. This episode was actually pretty great! It couldn’t possibly compare to William Massachusett’s speech (I will never get tired of that speech or that name), but I don’t even really consider that thing a Log Horizon episode. This was a Log Horizon episode, and a very good one at that. Log Horizon is finally getting to describe the actual meat of raid combat, and seems almost giddy to tell us everything it finds fun about these crazy battles.

You can check out my full ANN post here. Notes and such below the cut!

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God damn. This episode nailed it. The entire thing was one long, rousing speech from friggin’ William Massachusetts, laying out his philosophy on games and basically entire life story. And it was inspiring stuff! This is the kind of stuff SAO continuously tinkers with, but isn’t really self-aware enough to intelligently engage – here, the validity of virtual realities is established in strident terms through the degree to which William has invested in and learned from them. The sense of isolation and other-ness he feels in the real world is honestly exactly the kind of thing that prompts stuff like GamerGate (I almost felt tempted to offer some kind of “this is an unhealthy place to be, this can lead to very destructive attitudes” disclaimer to my ANN post), but the base emotions themselves are very earnest and understandable. This episode was basically a self-contained essay on the psychology of gaming, framed as a rousing call to arms. It was a hell of a thing.

Here’s the full ANN post. Jumbled, breathless notes below:

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We jumped over to Shiroe’s camp this week, where things aren’t going terribly well. I was legitimately surprised by how solid Shiroe’s central death-reflection monologue was – after a long arc with Akatsuki that’s been about as kid-friendly as possible, I definitely wasn’t expecting a long sequence predicated on being old enough to feel embarrassed about the ways youthful insularity is actually a kind of selfishness. That by itself would have made this one of the best episodes this season, but that last repeat of the Ash Lake sequence was just too egregious of a cost-cutting measure for me to let slide. Still, I’m looking forward to where Shiroe’s arc takes us from here.

Incidentally, I’m including my actual during-episode notes below the cut for this one. They’re notes for me, not for any audience, so they’re far less “performative” than the time stamp posts, but I’ve had people ask me to post them a few times, so I’m including them anyway. Hope you enjoy!

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