Log Horizon 2

Episode 13

With the first half's actual plot concluded, Log Horizon unsurprisingly spent the final week of the year on a one-off filler episode. Valentine's Day! Lots of low-key love drama, silly gags, and Nyanta helping people cook delicious presents. Not much happened, but that wasn't really the point - this week was all about checking in on friends and seeing them be adorable together.

What internal drama existed this week was basically all about cooking Valentine's Day sweets and trying to prompt some love confessions, and so in line with both of those goals, this episode introduced the coconia fruit - a fruit that supposedly has the power to reveal who someone loves. We started off with Serara and Nyanta talking about the fruit, with Serara sporting possibly her most improbably adorable outfit yet - she basically looked like a big pink marshmallow with cat ears. From there, the next adorable moment was Isuzu baking something for Rudy, wielding the apparently cooking-friendly “Newlywed's Apron Dress.” That was basically the pattern for this episode - stop by an old friend, watch them fret over mild love troubles, maybe get some assistance from cooking/romance expert Nyanta, move on. Light and fluffy times with old friends.

There were a couple gestures towards the larger plot, though they were mainly just reminders of what's going on in the background. We checked in briefly with Lenessia, who managed a ten second turnaround between “I hope Crusty's okay” and “this cake is delicious!” We checked in with Shiroe regarding Akihabara's status with its magical defenses down. And we stopped by Rieze, Misa, and the science guild heads, who confirmed we still don't have a clue what's going on with Crusty. And then it was back to the cooking!

The episode's biggest romantic thread was, as expected, the old Akatsuki-minori-Shiroe triangle. There's no real tension to this conflict, as it seems profoundly unlikely that Log Horizon is the kind of show that would ever progress beyond hopeless crushes, but I did like how ominous this episode decided to make all their silly confrontations. Lots of dramatic pans, wonderfully silly organ music, and even a deadpan “this is one of the worst things to happen in Log Horizon's history” from the eternally imperturbable Nyanta. For once, I actually agreed with Tetra - it's impossible to take these crushes that seriously, and the show itself seems to be less and less willing to do that as it goes on. Given that, the quest to discover Shiroe's love ending in “I love curry!” seemed just about right.

Something actually almost happened in this episode's last scene, as we checked back in with the despondent Nureha. There's a pretty strange disconnect between her confidence at the end of the first season and her trapped princess routine now, but I get the feeling that's actually reflective of her being a reasonably complex person, so I'm interested to see where it goes. Overall, this episode was its own fluffy reward - a light retread of old romances that really just existed to show off the characters spending time with each other. Everybody likes cake.

Rating: B-

Log Horizon 2 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Nick writes about anime, storytelling, and the meaning of life at Wrong Every Time.