Log Horizon is finally getting a long awaited third season, and the question that I think is on everyone’s minds is “Will it be better than last season”? Season two is generally regarded as much worse than the first, though many reasons I’ve seen given online feel off to me. A lot of people like to point to the filler, particularly the arc focusing on the kids, and worse art and blame that for the show’s drop in quality. If that was the case then surely season three should be able to pick itself back up and return to its former glory! I’m not so sure though. Season two displayed a shift in the series’ focus which is much more widespread than a few filler arcs.
First, I think it’s important to understand what draws people to Log Horizon in the first place. It’s not that hard to find really, it’s Sword Art Online but with politics. That’s an oversimplification but it gets to the core of its appeal: a video-game isekai that focuses more on social dynamics than fights or action. The characters have to come to terms with the consequences of being plopped into a video game world and the social structures that come from it. Conflict arises when a new social issue is discovered, like the ability of guild leaders to basically enslave lower level members or the giant power disparity between adventurers and people of the land, and these are usually resolved through elaborate schemes spanning multiple episodes.
If this is the core appeal of Log Horizon, then season two fails on all fronts. Episode ten has William, the leader of Silver Sword, giving a speech to his defeated guildmates after a failed raid. In it, he says that their loss is only a bit of data recorded on the server, but he’s decided that the “bits recorded on the server matter”. He recalls how people thought he was weird for playing Elder Tale so much back in the old world, but he really cared about the game. The issue is that he talks about it as though it’s still just a game. Elder Tale is his reality now, but the speech comes off as though the outcome of this raid doesn't matter; after all, it’s just another loss stored in some database. Treating the new world like it’s just a game goes against the core conceit that these characters need to learn to live inside of it. The issues in season one aren’t game issues but human ones, and they’re solved accordingly.
Another example of season two’s shift in focus comes during the kids’ quest for what’s essentially a bag of holding. When monsters attack a town the party is staying in, a strange group called the Odyssey Knights fend them off. Their methods, though, involve throwing themselves at the monsters and repeatedly reviving until they win. Touya attempts to stop one of them and they have a discussion. Apparently, the Knights are just a group of people who think dying enough will make them return home to the old world, since dying shows them memories of their past life. After this Touya starts asking the man if he’d ever died in the real world and we start getting flashbacks to Touya’s life. Flashbacks to the old world are fairly common in season two and are present in the raid scene I mentioned as well. These flashbacks serve to give context to the characters and remind us of the world they came from, but the appeal of the show is how they learn to live in the new one. Season one gives a few offhand remarks about characters’ pasts and we see one shot of Touya and these little bits of information are more than enough. Flashbacks shift focus from the need to accept the new world to a longing for the old one. The entire Odyssey Knights plot has nothing to do with the world of Elder Tale, instead being a generic conflict where “we never asked to come here”, and this is because of the shift in focus from new to old.
The penultimate episode is perhaps the worst offender. The cast find a way to stop a sleeping moth invasion by destroying an antenna, but doing so also means destroying a potential way to return to their world. This conflict hinders Shiroe’s ability to lead, but when the rest of the cast tells him they don’t mind staying in the new world he regains his confidence and they’re able to continue their mission. Shiroe, and everybody else for that matter, should already be comfortable with staying in Elder Tale as the entire first season is based on that assumption. The final non-combat conflict of the show is resolved by the characters reaffirming something that should be a given. At this point, Log Horizon is no longer about learning to live in Elder Tale but instead trying to get out.
This is why I’m coming in very skeptical about season three. This isn’t just poor dialogue or pacing issues (and believe me there are a LOT of pacing issues), but a fundamental shift away from what made the show unique and appealing in the first place. Could they fix it? Sure, but, assuming the light novel doesn’t deviate as well, it’s pretty unlikely. After waiting so long for a season three, I really want it to be something that was worth the wait, but I’m not going to get my hopes up.