“Hollow Hunger” — Overlord and a Complicated Viewing Experience
I’m coming in hot this time, Overlord has caused me more frustration than anything I can remember watching in the last few years. Four separate times, I have tried to articulate my feelings about the isekai and felt “off-point” in ways I could not figure out. For the headaches searching my thoughts has brought me, I have found this little project helpful in refining a way to summarize my feelings regarding whatever show is a bit more streamlined. Here’s hoping this means more articles!
What I Liked: There is an undeniable charm to how the characters are drawn, both in the show itself and in the EDs that reflect the art/concept art from the source material. I think, in some ways, this is a nice snapshot of what works (or, as we will get into soon, what should work) for Overlord- everything looks the part of a memorable anime. There is a surprising amount of characters and magical abilities that left me excited to see what would be explored next. For lack of a more worldly expression, I found Ainz and his companions to just be cool. Like they all look and sound cool, their powers are cool, and they show all of this off in spades.
Speaking of cool things, the OPs/EDs for this anime go hard. I know it sounds silly to put it as its own dedicated paragraph here, but, honestly, I don’t think I would have watched Overlord had it not been for adoring the many songs that awesome artists like MYTH & ROID, OxT, and Mayu Maeshima belted out. What makes it even better is that, for the EDs, we got that LN art style of the characters which add a ton of charm. I ran to a few of the songs (VORACITY and NO MAN’S DAWN, specifically) before, but now I find almost all of the OPs/EDs steadily in the rotation.
What I Didn’t Like: Despite the fun characters and promise, Overlord simply fails to deliver on its promises. I alluded to this at the beginning of the article, but this is one of the most frustrating anime I have watched in quite some time. As mentioned, there are so many characters with cool designs and a carefully considered fantasy world constructed here, but the story never does much with them outside of a few arcs. I know, that sounds a bit drastic, but if you haven’t seen the series, I can think of an apt analogy. Every season of Overlord is spent setting the table beautifully, making sure the presentation for the guests is pristine; you can walk into the dining room and just catch a whiff of delicious, mouth watering dishes ready in mere moments. Only thing is, you sit there for hours, but the meal never actually shows up. You open the door to the kitchen, and, bizarrely, there is no food there. It smells like there was supposed to be a meal, but it is not there for some reason. You leave, hungry and confused. There was so much promise though, so when you get a call a year or two later to return for a meal, you cautiously accept, hoping to see that promised meal.
There are so many points where you assume there is a rhyme or reason for what Ainz is doing, but it ultimately ends up just being yet another mean-spirited display of the main faction being impossibly overpowered. What makes this worse is there are several instances where it might make sense for a plotline where Ainz is searching out other players who were stuck in the MMO, but it always crashes back to earth when the mage throws a tantrum and mauls his enemies at the slightest instance of inconvenience. We spend four seasons being fluffed for some big payoff that simply never happens or even comes close to developing. The cycle is essentially “a new cool group of people are explored for almost an entire season, Ainz’s group overpowers them, everyone gets thirsty for Ainz, repeat.”
Final Thoughts: By this point, returning to Overlord feels like an exercise in the sunken cost fallacy — I don’t really want to come back, but I care enough about the characters and world to hold out hope that there will be something that resembles something worthwhile. Time will tell, but it will take a lot of momentum for me to consider watching a fifth season of this anime weekly.
