The future of gaming is finally here! With the onset of fully immersive full-dive Virtual Reality technology, a brand new world of polished, Triple A games awaits you, with all of those inferior virtual reality games left behind in the past. Well, there are always going to be people who prefer to linger in the past, and 16 year old Rakuro Hizutome is one of them. His main passion is for the buggy, glitchy shovelware that most people have shunned, and he enjoys nothing more than battling it out against their broken mechanics and exploiting glitches to make the impossible possible. That is, until one day when a friend convinces him to at least try the most popular full-dive game on the market, Shangri-La Frontier! Despite his preferences, he actually enjoys his experience on the other side, but he’ll soon find out that this new game’s effect on him won’t be nearly as consequential as his bizarre playing style’s effect on the world of the game.

Shagri-La Frontier was produced by a studio named C2C, whom I have never actually discussed before, probably because they’ve barely produced more than a dozen anime series in the 13 years they’ve been around. In most of that time, they’ve only released a single anime a year, with few exceptions, and before watching this show, I’ve only seen two of their titles before... Those being Reincarnated as a Sword and Wandering Witch, both of which were good, but were also honestly kind of forgettable in the grand scheme of things. I don’t remember them as well as they might deserve, but I remember them looking good. Not amazing, but good. The same could honestly be said for Shangri-La Frontier, which also looks good, albeit for the most part nothing special. The fantasy land it takes place in looks generic, like every other isekai/video game world you’ve seen before, but it’s still attractive to look at, and the background colors stand out in a visually pleasing way.

The animation is also pretty solid, especially during fight scenes, which are pretty much the highlight of the series. The action is fast and comprehensive, and the villains our heroes have to stand against always look properly intimidating, even as they lose the advantage. If I had one nitpick about the action, it’s that there are way too many moments where it stops cold on a partially frozen key frame so that Rakuro(now going by Sunraku) can explain what just happened and why it was significant to a little bunny who sometimes serves as the audience surrogate for his exposition. Including the bunny at least makes the exposition feel more natural, but they don’t always use him, and even when they do, the reason he’s there is never anything less than transparent. Design-wise, everything looks fine, albeit generic. I don’t like Sunraku’s design, but I’m pretty sure that’s the point... I mean, considering the in-story explanation for it, it is very much literally cursed. The only part of the design I really liked were some of the bad guys, including the super-cool looking crystal scorpions, which were CG animation done right.

The English dub was produced by Crunchyroll, and Eric Vale is pretty awesome in the lead role. He’s always had a really fun main character voice, and he turns the effort up a notch for this particular character. He likes to put little bursts of effort into his line deliveries out of nowhere, going just slightly over the top in ways that immediately convey Sunraku’s upbeat attitude and unfailing passion to the audience, especially contrasted against the more subdued population of players surrounding him in the town. Brittney Karbowski is another highlight, as she plays a male gamer with a female avatar, and this works on a few different levels. First off, she has always bilt her voice acting career around playing both genders, and the voice she uses here has the same level of rasp that she would give someone like Blackstar from Soul Eater, while also adding a slight feminine lilt. I’d also like to spotlight the cool, scrappy little accent that Lindsay Seidel gave to Bilac. The script utilizes some modern gaming related slang, but not enough to make it sound annoying, just authentic. It’s a really good dub overall, I’d recommend it.

I had heard mixed reviews about this show before going in, and I was a little worried, but I thought it got off to a really strong start. I really liked Sunraku as a character, and I thought the idea he was presenting us with had a lot of promise. I’d certainly never heard of it before. You have a hardcore gamer who cut his teeth on broken, borderline unplayable garbage games, and now he’s suddenly thrust into a popular mainstream hit where he actually surprisingly likes it, and the skills he learned from his trash games helped him to approach the good game in a new way that in turn alters the status quo of that game’s world. On paper, that sounds awesome. There are so many possibilities, and it’s not like the story fails to find some good ones. I’m especially fond of the fact that Sunraku doesn’t go all pretentious hipster on us and start musing about how much better trash games are than this hoity toity mainstream BS. No, all kinds of games can offer all kinds of appeal, and I like that this fact is represented.

Now, as far as the cross-game logic is concerned, is that how it actually works? I have no idea, because I’m not that much of a gamer. I could most charitably be referred to as a filthy casual. I log into Fallout 76 every day to perform the daily/weekly challenges, and I might play some pokemon on the handheld portion of my switch, but I don’t actively play much. I kind of relate to Sunraku on the grounds that I play a to of buggy games(mostly from Bethesda) and I love finding ways to fuck with maps and boundary break(especially in RWBY Grimm Eclipse) but would these skill translate in any way to something more polished like The Last of Us or Sekishiro? I don’t know, but it doesn’t feel too hard to believe, at least not in this game’s own universe. I can stretch my suspension of disbelief at least that far. What’s far harder to believe is all of the unique circumstances that Sunraku is able to experience that an entire pre-existing player base hasn’t figured out yet. Even I know secret bosses and quests don’t stay secret for THAT long.

In addition to Sunraku making the rest of the players come off as lazy or incompetent by comparison, other problems do unfortunately make themselves known early and often, and it starts with the fact that once a couple of episodes have gone by, with the premise having established itself, and the status quo of the series becoming apparent, things kind of just start to plateau. The Achilles heel of this anime is that it’s an isekai-adjacent series about people being transferred into a video game, and they can leave whenever they want to. If you can’t discern what’s wrong with that concept, it’s the fact that there are no stakes whatsoever. Say whhat you want about Sword Art Online, but that reveal about being stuck in the game, and that dying there means dying for real, that was fucking genius. That made you care about a story and characters you probably wouldn’t have given one solitary shit about otherwise. And even in the second story arc, Asuna’s life and freedom were still at stake.

This concept is an extremely tricky one to write, because you HAVE to give the audience some reason to get invested. I haven’t seen Dot Hack, and I’ve seen very little of Digmon 02, but these are the kind of complaints I’ve heard about them... Why 02 had such a hard time retaining a steady audience, and why the only thing most people liked about Dot Hack was the music. There’s only one anime I’ve actually seen about gamers who had the ability to leave whenever they wanted that was actually good, and it was called Recovery of an MMO Junkie. That show actually prioritized the real lives of its cast, which were extremely interesting, and they received amazing character development. In Shangri-La Frontier, what do we even know about Rakuro? There’s a girl who is hopelessly in love with him and he doesn’t know it, but who fucking cares? That’s something almost every male main character has. He has a sister and mother, both of whom I do really like, but you barely see either of them after like one appearance.

Aside from that, I think Rakuro had a few scenes in school, but do you remember them? I don’t, other than obligatory crush girl being obligatory crush girl. There’s almost nothing interesting about his life outside of gaming, so why even give him a life outside of gaming, when all it really accomplishes is taking all of the suspense out of his fight scenes? Well, okay, I guess I like the scene where he returns to an old trash game for training, I think his interactions with a newbie were really fun and well written, but that’s kind of it. Other than that, this story very quickly settles into a formula where Sunraku is constantly getting himself into dangerous situations that are far outside of his level, he gets the shit kicked out of him, he hulks up by reminding himself that he lives for that shit, and he either wins or he loses and just revives at a save spot anyway. At one point he even tries powering through the same mission over and over again, dying and going right back as his strategy evolves. I’m not saying that’s not smart, it is clever writing to show your protagonist using the mechanics of the world around him to his advantage, what I’m saying is that it’s not fun.

Probably the worst example is his fight alongside two other characters against Wethermon the Tombguard, a unique monster who gives Sunraku his biggest challenge to date. Now, there’s this old rule in comedy that the only thing worse thn an unfunny joke is a long unfunny joke. This is why I hated One Punch Man season 2... It was the same joke as the first season, over and over again, with the punchline always being “Sitama shows up to resolve everything with one punch,” but it just kept taking longer and longer to happen, when we all knew what was going to happen. Well, ShangriLa Frontier has opened my yes to another rule; The only thing worse than a fight you don’t care about is a long fight you don’t care about. Death doesn’t matter in this world, you can try again infinitely if you lose, so why are we spending multiple episodes on this fight? Yeah, Dragonball would spend multiple episodes on fight scenes, but Dragonball could get away with it because Dragonball never failed to make you care.

I never rooted for Sunraku because I didn’t give a shit about Sunraku. He had no fucking motivation outside of just playing the game. The entire appeal of this series is just to watch a gamer play a game, and yeah, that might work with let’s players, because you’re watching real world personalities explore and experience a fully existing video game that you may or may not have already played yourself, and you get to enjoy their reactions and commentary. You don’t get that by watching a fictional character play a fictional video game. You are basically just watching an isekai at that point, but without any sense of danger to keep you on your toes, and without any driving force to keep you invested. And if I’m being honest, the world-building is nothing special either. Almost all of it revolves around Sunraku’s personal experiences, which are mostly unique to him anyway, so the game’s world barely has any sense of identity divorced from him. I don’t like all the bunnies either, so sue me.

There are hints throughout, and especially towards the end, that there’s more to this world than meets the eye, and I’m assuming they’re going to get more into that in the second season, but I kinda don't care anymore. 25 episodes is just way too much edging for me, especially for a story that didn’t really grab me in any other way, so if you haven’t gotten to the point yet, I’m just gonna log off right here.

Shagri-La Frontier is available from Crunchyroll. The original light novels y Katarina are not available stateside, but the manga adaptaion is available from Kodansha comics.

What bums me out the most about Shangri-La Frontier isn’t what it is, but what it could have been. Just looking at this show from the surface, almost everything about it should have worked for me. I loved the original premise, I liked the main character(design aside), I related to him on at least some level, and I did like the creative energy that the writing started out with. I would have fallen head over heels for this series, if it had just given me something to actually care about. Some kind of stakes, some kind of goal, anything. I’m not asking for much, you could keep the light-hearted, silly tone and still found a way to make this story engaging. That did not happen. As strong as it might have started, I found myself struggling to get through the story at multiple points, and not only did it never get better, more than a few people have told me that it will not get better, and I believe them. I’ll give credit to the stuff I did like, but overall, I didn’t like anywhere near as much as I expected to.

I give Shangri-La Frontier a 4/10