Log Horizon 2 is the second season of the Log Horizon television anime series. Log Horizon tells the tale of what happens when players of the MMORPG game, Elder Tale, mysteriously find themselves actually inside the game after the 12th expansion, “Novasphere Pioneers,” is added. The main character of the series is Shiroe, and he is joined by his two companions Naotsugu and Akatsuki. As the first season progressed, Shiroe helped to establish alliances between guilds by forming the Round Table, helped to introduce commerce and new ideas to the game’s world, and he even formed his own guild called Log Horizon which included many of Shiroe’s friends as its members.
Of course, not everything went smoothly. The Round Table found itself entangled in issues involving the People of the Land and the nobles, as well as taking on goblin forces that attacked and caused chaos.
Episode Five primarily focuses on the serial killer that’s wandering around Akihabara right around Christmas Eve. It’s revealed that the Royal Guard, the security system from when Log Horizon was a game, isn’t activating and removing the killer when it’s designed to take care of the threats that affect the town. When a member of Souji’s guild is attacked by the killer, he goes to hunt him down in order to get revenge. It was actually kind of frightening to see the usually friendly Souji look downright sinister and almost evil when he talks about getting his revenge.
It was surprising to see Kinjou Kunie make another appearance, this time to visit with Lenessia in Akihabara. It turns out the killer is a member of the Kunie clan who is a member of the Royal Guards; he stole a set of movable armor, which allows him to be stronger than the adventurers. Lenessia realizes that this means a Person of the Land has killed an adventurer, and now she is distraught. After seeing how this affects Lenessia, Akatsuki takes it upon herself to go after the killer.
When Kinjou was first introduced back in Episode One, I had this feeling that the Kunie clan couldn’t be trusted. Between the act of the killer, as well as Kinjou sending Shiroe and the others off on the raid in the Depths of Palm, it makes me wonder if the Kunie clan has some kind of issue with the adventurers and that they’re trying to do what they can in order to hamper the adventurers’ progress.
As we see at the end of the episode, both Souji and Akatsuki are unsuccessful in taking down the serial killer. Not only that, we see Shiroe being defeated during a chaotic battle taking place in the Depths of Palm.
So with this episode, it appears we’ve just about returned to what we saw right at the end of Episode One. Unfortunately, I can’t quite say we’ve made it there yet, since the preview for Episode Six makes it clear that Akatsuki hasn’t been resurrected quite yet. From the preview, it appears a lot of focus will be on Akatsuki as she travels to where the adventurers go after being killed but before they are resurrected. Personally, I think that Episode Six could be fascinating, since we’ve never personally followed a character that went through this process prior to now. It was just always stated in the past that they died and were resurrected, and it sounded as if the resurrection is an automatic thing. I admit this is something I’d taken for granted prior to now, so I think it would be nice to see how exactly resurrection works in Log Horizon.
I suspect that after Shiroe and Akatsuki are resurrected, the immediate concern will be trying to find a way to deal with the serial killer running around Akihabara. Also, the potential is there for Shiroe to try doing the raid in the Depths of Palm again. I’ve very curious to see what direction the series goes in as the story continues.