[apr]

Finished reading Overlord vols 5-7 by Maruyama Kugane. Sorry for repeating myself, but it's the story of a VR MMO player who discovers that the game has turned into reality, and he's now a max-level undead spellcaster in a fantasy world. The anime adaptation will be out in July, but the visual style is so comical that I have no hopes that it will be watchable, since the original is more dark and serious.

Books 5 and 6 combined to form one arc, where the series' protagonist barely features at all, instead following a member of his horde -- a large host of powerful NPCs who've come to life. The fifth book is pretty slow, mostly setting up a collision between this evil horde and a crime syndicate, but when it explodes into battle in the sixth book, it's very entertaining to behold. Especially seeing one of the top ranking adventure parties take on a middling horde monster, since their struggle just serves to highlight how absurdly powerful the eminent overlord must be.

Book 7, however, is where the author finally crosses the line he's been walking so carefully throughout the series. Whereas earlier conflicts have seen the protagonist face decidedly malicious opponents, in this book he willingly kills or causes the death of undeniably good people. And then the author rubs the reader's face in it with the epilogue. It can be argued that this has been long coming, with a growing indifference toward humans from the protagonist's side, now that he's been transformed into an undead skeleton lich, but while watching evil get crushed by greater evil is gleeful fun, there's a bitter aftertaste having seen innocents suffer the same fate.

From now on there are wildly different paths the author can take with the series. Will the protagonist sink deeper into darkness and truly take over the entire world, scorching the earth and leaving it filled with moving corpses? Or will he realize what he's becoming, and turn against his own horde, forced to defeat everything he has worked to build up? Or will we perhaps see the heroes of the world unite to fight him, finally turning the original protagonist into the true antagonist? So far there have been only hints of other players, mostly strewn across history, walking the land as living legends, but if they finally make an entrance, it could twist the story into something else completely.

All I know is that depending on how volume 8 turns out, I might have to give up on the series altogether, because it's unpleasant to read about unsympathetic characters for too long.