Honestly, I’m extremely hesitant to make such a review since @Budwii3245 made such an amazing in-depth review that I also recommend you check out here just shouting him out.

To preface note that the synopsis portion is skippable by all means

Main Synopsis

Overlord is about a middle-aged gamer named Momonga who role-plays in the VRMMO RPG online fantasy game of Yggdrasil which borrows many aspects of fantasy games like WoW and D&D specifically in its classes, species, aesthetic style, and especially the RPG online format which is filled with cosmetics and tons of extras to personalize each player experience.




Even the actual cover art of the series is draped in meticulous lurid medieval fantasy curiosities which mirror the aesthetic of D&D covers which gives you a taste of what the experience is meant to be like in a painting styled chronicled portrait



In the game, Momonga role-plays as an evil Licht Overlord with his friends as a non-human monster role-playing evil-aligned guild called Ainz Ooal Gown, or at least he used to until the priorities of reality such as marriage and child-rearing along with the burdens of employment caused every friend/member of the guild to start taking their leave all except Momonga who takes it upon himself to keep the guild in shape, paying the fee’s for having a guild, and data cost for the NPC's he and his friends created in hopes that his friends come back one day so they can have fun again.

They never do and on the last day of the game before the shutdown, Momonga takes one last view of the guild taking in memories and joys he had with his friends before the shutdown.

Except it never happens.

For whatever reason not only has the game, not shut down but Momonga finds himself having literally become the skeletal Licht overlord and to top it off the NPC's his friends created have become sentient and alive the personalities programmed into them coming to life.



Now Momonga has to traverse his way through his newly acquired managerial position on the top hierarchy of immoral evil-aligned monsters who revere him as a literal god and the newfound stress that eats away at him mentally as he is as far from the actual idea of being an all-knowing overlord figure as one can be to top it all he’s been indirectly railroaded into a world domination plan which basically what the series is about, Momonga shifting more and more into a true Overlord literally and physically albeit winging all the while.


Overlord avoids the pitfalls of what can happen with overpowered characters something along with the likes of the audience not being able to emotionally connect with the characters due to obstacles being blown away so the struggle of the character gets blotted out and removed making it feel all pointless without any drama or obstacle

A good example of working with the strengths of a character being overpowered in their fictional universe is Saitama’s whose lack of passion he once had in his younger years was replaced by a persistent dull and despondent attitude to any challenge knowing that it won’t even be a challenge to him



Thus the emotional attachment comes from seeing Saitama get his expectations built up only to be disappointed or seeing him get angry over the mundane details like when he’s late to a weekend sale or losing at games even though he has conquered the physical limitations the character still has human moments of stress and his own obstacles of importance that audiences can relate to like finding passion in your life again.




Luckily what makes Momonga such an engaging character to be with is that the bulk of his real problems come from the overseeing of the vast organization of powerful NPC's, the constant pressure to conduct himself as what he see’s as the equivalent of a president of a company a completely daunting facade that he can never catch a break from, navigating an unknown world like learning the monetary exchange rate or the threat/danger that this new world poses

And While Momonga is competent and cautious let’s just say he has to feel his way around this setting and roll with a lot of the punches.

Who is Momonga

Ultimately Momonga is a guy who can be characterized in the beginning even before being transported to a real fantasy world if you were to just monitor his behavior.

1. he feels frustrated at his friends for leaving but understands that they all had other things in reality that was worth more than that of a game world showing that this world is basically all Momonga has in his current life or at least the thing he values the most even during the times when his friends were long gone.


2. He is constantly shown to talk to himself which is a side effect of loneliness in his life further amplifying that this game world of his was probably the only place he felt like he could socialize and be himself



From even these bits we know that instead of moving on and maybe finding happiness elsewhere in life he clings to the romanticization of his epic adventures with his friends as if they were legendary chronicles he would reminisce

Momonga has no real friends left so he clings to the only things that feel real anymore which are the NPC's often time overlaying his friend's images on top of the Nazarick NPC's because of how his friend's personalities bleed from the NPC's they've crafted

Momonga idolized his life in Yggdrasil more than his real life and his current life becomes that life he idolized

The Characters of Overlord

The denizens of Nazarick are bursting with the idiosyncrasies of the people that created them you get a feeling that the characters have personalities likes and dislikes and theirs even a great web of interpersonal relationships linking people in Nazarick

But what makes the Nazarick NPC's come off as in a strange way is their acceptance of these personalities they’ve been given remember all the NPC's are player designed characters from clothing and face to personality and there’s never this inter conflict with the NPC's even little bits of friction between characters are explained by those very characters as the fact that they’ve been designed to taunt each other and that they don’t hate each other at all rather they have this understanding that they were created with these personalities because they’re creators deemed it as such and just accept it as is.



Demiurge is the suave, dapper/fashionable, and sadistic demon advisor of Nazarick to put it simply this personality of him is reflected in his creator who is essentially a Chūnibyō obsessed with roleplaying as evil character's which helps explain why he is the evilest affinity character in the guild this type of stuff has been excerpt from the show and its sort of why I dislike it a bit because these NPC's have a lot of layers to why they are like they are and why they act how they act.



This is also without going into the many characters that exist outside of Nazarick which range in species and backgrounds whether it's a fallen noble girl trying who become the breadwinner of her family or a heroic lizard warrior who goes on his own epic quest and tale.

Overlord is sprawling with characters and they all range in creativity and play with tropes of old mix and match and they’re a staggering detail that the novels go into with characters that can deliver poignancy and empathy or carve a characters nature and this juxtaposed the quick or cruel deaths that can come afterword.

The Play of Perspective in Overlord

You might begin to compare Overlord to other fantasy stories on the line of Tolkien for the epicness of the tale’s being told or maybe you’ll go for the dark fantasy route with things like The Witcher by Andrzej Sapkowski or Kentaro Miura’s Berserk due to Overlord having quite a bit of dark elements and bites of hopeless butchery but I think its proper to say that the series has a more George R. R. Martin approach with the multiple factions and extensive cast of characters major and minor.

But at the same time, the show holds so many different tones it's dark one second but then it’s extremely comedic.




Take a look at our main character on one side we see him essentially anxious and paranoid in his head as he mules over what to say but there’ll be times when we're effectively shifted to another group of characters perspective and it turns into a more serious laced perspective on Momonga as we get to view this character from outside thoughts and its almost as if the tone reverts to what it actually should be a horrifying dark series.






You can often forget that the NPC's have zero compassion for humans or rather any life other than Nazarick and this is because of how different scenes can really liven the characters past their cruel actions almost disassociating them from the people they acted like before but only for a brief second before the novel reminds you who these people are

The Ethos of Overlord

"I don't believe the main characters in novels and movies who rescue people without asking for anything in return.
Readers who acknowledge that prioritizing yourself is the right mentality will enjoy this book.
It's very direct." - Maruyama, Kugane

As put well by the author himself Overlord takes a different approach it throws the idea of a hero out the window in a sense.

In Overlord it's about prioritizing yourself over others because you simply are not some God with endless might everybody has their limitations and if you bite off more than you can chew for something that doesn’t benefit you then you're breaking yourself for no reason other than suicidal posturing that weakens you or creating a persona for others to latch onto.

In KOTR 2 (or Knights of the Old Republic 2) Kreia says this





"If you seek to aid everyone that suffers in the galaxy, you will only weaken yourself… and weaken them".

"If you care for others, then dispense with pity and sacrifice and recognize the value in letting them fight their own battles. And when they triumph, they will be even stronger for the victory."

Helping others at the cost of your own strength is a weakness and relying on others to win your fights is also a weakness both will make you weaker for it and I find this very same concept in Overlord as our main character never extends help towards situations that don’t or won’t benefit him in the future.

He saves a village to establish a good persona and to learn the currency of the land and the geopolitics of the region and the surrounding regions he ultimately gains from saving them in two major ways.

This isn’t a story about heroics or survival its about world domination

The Anime Adaptation

to put it plainly while the adaptation did put the series on the map for me in a big way one of the big reasons why Overlord works as a novel is that novels can fit so much more detail and info into its pages if you tried to do the same with any other medium like movies, tv shows, and anime the info dumps would eat into the episode time and it would be extremely boring

so in essence the adaptation was forced to make cuts to the novel in order to fit it into a tv anime experience which I don't mind but I think unlike with other adaptations of novels like Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Konosuba, or Baccano where the adaptations elevated the material in interesting ways



Konosuba is drop-dead hilarious with no thanks in part to the amazing vocal performances of its characters and the amazing comedic editing which enhances the comedy of the serious being a total inversion of the romanticized otherworld fantasy adventure cut with the utter horror stemming from Kazama's voice as he is forced to carry and haul his utterly atrocious set up of an adventurer team with him



Baccano reorganizes a lot of the novels and trims down the cast of characters in order to streamline its story elements of bouncing between different characters to make the show feel more cohesive add in the kinetic action moments and an amazing jazzy score coupled with the best dub impersonation of a depression-era new york city.



with Overlord I feel the team chopped as much info-dumping as they could and then proceeded to animate the basic events of the narrative of the adapting volumes and while this works to an extent you lose out on a lot of information that really makes the series feel different


SPOILER
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Spoiler, click to view

take a scene from the novel adapted to the anime in which six incredibly skilled assassins/mercenaries are all killed within seconds in the anime it played straight you see the characters they say their names and then at the drop of a hat within less than a minute they all get pulverized.
now when you look at the novel and the same scene taking place the novel goes into so much more extravagant detail into the background and abilities of all the enemies their battle styles their rise to fame and the danger they possess as well as comparing them to other characters that were introduced and giving us a sense of they're rank.
all of this is dished out before each one takes their swift and horrifying death and their mental state as each of them begins to realize they're going to die they're something about being in the mental state of characters as they're in the action what they think and how they react to it that adds a layer of familiarity with the characters as they are then torn asunder

holy shit this took forever I want to shoot myself ha ha ha ha ha the worst part theirs more I want to talk about but I decided to cut this short