Overlord (2015)

Heh yeah one of the few times where the game connection kinda ruins the flow cause the attacks need to be called out & a lot have kinda long names. Still great episode, especially that watch, heheh.

"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."

The fight was glorious. The death clock was awesome.

He summoned a Sharknado. I cannot take this seriously.

But yeah, they did get the feeling of high stakes and high tension across very well.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Buffs everywhere.

Ains has a very chuuni skill.

Hmm, if all the call-your-moves chatter was a problem, maybe they could have done without the "Maximize Magic" statements at the very least and just stuck to the base spell names (with the "Triple maximize magic!" in front of some of the names, they got kinda hilariously long). It was still a nice fight scene though, but it's too bad they ran out of time in the episode before they could finish it. At least they got to use the credits time to explain that Shalltear used her ressurection item to avoid the instant death attack. If they waited until the next episode for that, then having her seemingly lose the battle only to reveal that she hasn't might have come off as kinda cheesy.

I thought they did the best they could with the chit chat in order to try to explain and convey the reasoning behind the attacks, but then, I read the novel first and that one was even more long-winded. The main reasoning behind it is because this is supposed to be an RPG fight, not an action fight (something that becomes more important because Utilizing his knowledge of RPG PVP battles in Yggdrasil to the fullest is how Ainz wins the fight). So the writers really tried to do the best they could to explain the relevant RPG mechanics within the short time frame they were given (both in terms of time left in the episode and in terms of time they could without disrupting the flow of battle too much). It wasn't meant to be an action battle and instead more of how a Pv P battle would go in an RPG (relying more on strategy than twitch reflexes), but given that this is an animation and not a novel, it's kinda a catch 22, I suppose (unlike the novel, where the fact that it's a written-word medium makes it easier to accept it as a calculated RPG battle of wits).

edited 22nd Sep '15 9:39:37 PM by TiamatRoar

I know, but then that raises questions about how warriors fought in Yggdrasil. They didn't even have Martial Arts skills.

Well Aura had pretty slick moves when fighting the elemental.

And Shalltear here had "Skills". Difference between that and martial arts is kinda unclear. Perhaps that they are all cooldown based, while martial arts are stamina based?

edited 22nd Sep '15 10:48:22 PM by Adannor

Gazef was pretty exhausted during his fight with the angels & hes pretty good enough to not sustain too many injuries so yeah theirs probably a stamina system to go with the mana gauge

"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."

IIRC, from the Light Novel, Martial Arts takes stamina to use (literal stamina, so you get tired out. Mana meanwhile just... runs out but doesn't fatigue you when it does, I think. Like most RP Gs.). It's stated during the first time Gazef fights those angels. I could be wrong since that was waaay back in Volume 1.

Skills, meanwhile... I think that they instead have a limited number of uses per skill (which is why Super Magic is more like a skill than magic, as it doesn't take MP and also has a limited number of uses per day). At least, that seems to have been the case in the Shalltear vs Ainz battle when Shalltear mentions she can use each skill a certain number of times. Too long ago for me to recall if anything explicit was stated.

edited 23rd Sep '15 12:14:39 AM by TiamatRoar

Well they obviously gotta recharge in some way. X times per battle, or per day (completely bonkers for a real MMO, but hey), or just X charges that recharge on a timer.

I'm not sure how familiar the writer was with actual MMOs rather than just tabletop games. Other things about Yggdrasil don't really make sense either. Anyway, yeah, now that I think about it I think Martial Arts do seem to run on stamina.

edited 23rd Sep '15 12:32:12 AM by Arha

Iduno, he got p2w part good enough. What else doesn't fit?

The absurd degree of player freedom is a theoretical possibility for a future Super-MMO.

Don't remember much offhand, though the absurd level of customization is definitely part of it. A company would not add in features like the Eclipse class' special ability that Ainz just used to kill that Einharjr and Shalltear. The class itself is completely hidden and is only accessible by playing an undead mage necromancer with super necromancer specializations despite necromancer being kind of crap. Nobody shares information in Yggdrasil either, which is kind of ridiculous, so there's actually a ton of hidden classes and gimmicks like that.

Well thats the point, a hidden bonus Easter egg. Also the necromancer class isnt really useless, its just more suited to role-playing than Pv P (which is my style, I never do well fighting other players) & the developers prolly foresaw the class wouldnt be widely used so they put in a surprise bonus for those that do.

"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."

Yeah, they just chose uniqueness and imbalance over generalised balance.

Watched up to episode 11 on Hulu. 12 is up but it's subscription only. =/

Good show, though.

You fell victim to one of the classic blunders!

Maybe the author played lots of Star Wars Galaxies (an MMO) or something. Becoming a Jedi in the original Star Wars Galaxies was a secret and also hell to do, and the game itself was very open-world with lots of Pv P and all sorts of secrets and housing everywhere. To this day people chalk it up to the start of how MM Os could have been if they focused more on world building instead of grinding and gratification like they do today. (Just "the start" though. Game was buggy as hell and needed a lot of work...)

If anything, Yggdrasil seems like a refined and expanded fantasy-genre version of Star Wars Galaxies with tons upon tons of pay-to-win thrown on top of it (of which the author shows he has a lot of knowledge of, lol. ...god I hate those random gacha boxes in MM Os these days. More like GOTCH'YA boxes, amirite?).

Yggdrasil is a virtual reality MMO (IE, technology that far exceeds our own) that takes place in the future, so I guess the author figured there'd be other MMO advancements since then as well, such as over 700+ magic spells and races or whatever and the ability to build huge-ass dungeons as big as cities for your guild base. The idea of there being super powerful secret classes and moves there isn't very far-fetched for a game advanced and large enough to have all that stuff in it in the first place.

(clearly it's a very optimistic idea of how MM Os will be in the future when you consider that most MM Os these days are shovelware trying to con people out of their money with pay-to-win features and not having any depth to them... well, even the author decided to keep the pay-to-win part. But hey, if MM Os were like that in the author's world, there wouldn't be any Overlord in the first place)

edited 23rd Sep '15 10:13:32 PM by TiamatRoar

Damn Id fucking play the hell out of that game.

"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."

Well, lots of people played the hell out of it in-universe. It's stated in the prologue that it was the most popular DMMO of its time and Momonga muses to himself in the first episode about how often he and his guildmates would stay up late at night or fight with their wives or whatever else over how much they played the game. It's notable that every single one of Momonga's guildmates quit the game not because they hated it, but due to various Real life reasons (as far as we know, at least).

It also lasted 12 years, which is pretty impressive for an MMO by today's standards. Makes one wonder what the heck newer DMM Os were like compared to it.

edited 24th Sep '15 10:36:00 PM by TiamatRoar

They say that, but then it's noted that there were only 800 guilds and no hints of multiple servers. Granted that Ainz' guild had the absolute minimum number of members, that still indicates a game that I would consider to be fairly small.

It should be noted that the game was really hard and punishing while promoting a lot of player freedom.

Death for example resulted losing 5 levels and you would lose one of your best pieces of gear to the guys that killed you. There were no restrictions for players attacking other players as well. Meaning if you were a newbie and just starting out you could get ganked, then they would take your stuff and you lose 5 levels. For new players this could be very frustrating combined with the fact that a lot of stuff like the monster races were hidden behind unlock requirement or paywalls.

Guilds probably only recruited people that could actually do stuff and lasted long enough in the game to gain some skill without quitting.

Look at Warcraft. Look at all the swarming wow-killers. Probably like that.

edited 24th Sep '15 11:59:45 PM by Adannor

So the Yggdrasil devs are kinda like Blizzard in that regard, heh.

"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."

Well they evidently went the opposite way in some regards: definitely no making the game content easy to access with harder modes on top, but hardcoreing it all the way.

edited 25th Sep '15 6:51:54 PM by Adannor

Heh thats funny cause ya know hearing all the complaints World Of Warcraft gets for things like getting to easy it makes the comparison a little more humorous

"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."